For the Love of Dirt: October 2023

Saturday, October 28, 2023

THEY.....

They came from a splintered place

They came like disease, blackened death

No longer they hid in the shadows beneath

From the halls of their mountain king

With a rush and a roar their stench rose on high.

And I shuddered with horror within

Nor watched the fire that swept from their eyes

Burning deep . Burning wild.

I saw them slink like a serpent’s tail

Writhing . Gasping.

Grasping as they rushed to their mountain king.

They descended like pirates with wasting flesh

And daggers, all rusting , more at the ready.

All for one and one for all.

Howling like banshees across the swamp

Piercing the rain. Piercing the screams.

So hidden within those walls

Twisting like eels they oozed and they slimed

And I froze in their icy chill.

The night was old, the moon was low.

When their horror came, so long ago.

They spoke to me on that rotting night

As they slithered around my feet.

We have come for you, said They,

We have waited for you….

Then They dragged me down

And carried me off

To the hall of their mountain king.

Photographs 2023. (Spoiler alert....the piece is about RATS living in the walls of a house)

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Raven Excerpts ( Halloween)

"Do we not dream of dreams?" -Nathan Reese Maher

EXCERPTS from the RAVEN (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary....

While I nodded, nearly nappy, suddenly there came a tapping....

rapping at my chamber door...

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me...

'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.

Like a choir going through vocal exercises. But no perfect pitches here.

This it is and nothing more.

Truly your forgiveness I implore but the fact I was napping, and so gently come rapping.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing....

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before...

Nevermore.

But the raven, sitting lonely spoke only that one word, as if his soul in that one word did outpour.

Then the bird said "Never more"

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

And his eyes have all the seeming of dreaming....

Photographs 2023.

Sunday, October 22, 2023

NATURE's GRAND FINALE...

"In Autumns that there were with morning mist and silver sun, and wind upon my hair..." -Tolkein

"That season of beginning..."-Truman Capote

"The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars..." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Be Alive..." Kyle Lake

"It was a beautiful bright autumn day,with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.." - Diana Gabaldon

"Autumn lingered on...." -Winston Graham

"I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it..." -Lee Maynard

"Sounds of autumn..." -Hall Borland

"The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves. we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!" -Humbert Wolfe

"Leaves blew over moonlit pavement..." - Ray Bradbury

"And all the lives we ever lived, and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves..." -Virginia Woolf

"Leaves are all flaring..." -Lauren Oliver

"Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture,so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn..." - Leo Tolstoy