self esteem

Fear and Faith #NaPoWriMo2017 #GloPoWriMo2017

Fear
A thief
Accomplice of doubt
Stealing away from me
Resignation

Faith
A gift
Given by grace
Saving me from myself
Affirmation

For Day 23 of Na/GloPoWriMo, Gloria Gonsalves provides the NaPoWriMo.net challenge – to write a double elevenie. It was suggested that it might be fun to try to write the double elevenie based on two nouns that are opposites, like sun and moon, or mountain and sea.

An elevenie is an eleven-word poem of five lines, with each line performing a specific task in the poem. The first line is one word, a noun. The second line is two words that explain what the noun in the first line does, the third line explains where the noun is in three words, the fourth line provides further explanation in four words, and the fifth line concludes with one word that sums up the feeling or result of the first line’s noun being what it is and where it is. A double elevenie would have two stanzas of five lines each, and twenty-two words in all.

Self-Worth Abraded

Subject to abuse
Sanity at breaking point
Self-worth abraded

A rough week provides the inspiration to make use of Ronovan’s Word of the Week: abrade – to rub or wear away especially by friction; to wear down in spirit.

Red Discs Cranking?

Images of red discs,
Worn by a slow cranking shaft –
Yet to understand

a genuine account of an abstract daydream, shared in response to today’s prompt at The Daily Post – my failure to make sense of my own daydream did make me a little ‘cranky’.

‘Love After Love’ by Derek Walcott (RIP)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.”
– Derek Walcott, poet and Nobel laureate (1930 – 2017)

The Mirror

My mirror is dull,
fogged and tarnished,
Cracked and warped
beyond repair.
My own reflection
is so diminished –
Is that really me
I see in there?

‘Here, use mine,’
says the Father,
‘It’s always shining,
crystal clear.
See me smiling,
over your shoulder?
Ready to wipe
your welling tears?’

Anyone
may use that mirror,
One unsullied
by this world’s lies.
Embed that truth,
make it a pillar,
And smile right back
at His smiling eyes.

“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
– 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NKJV)

originally written in 2014, and re-worked following today’s prompt at The Daily Post – “recognize”

Joy’s River

Shame’s tears ebb and flow
Mercies stem sorrows’ dull tides –
Joy’s river runs through

written in response to today’s RonovanWrites Weekly Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge #133 – “Flow & Tear”

Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge

The Whispering of Many – quadrille #24 @dVersePoets

I hear the whispering of many —
as together they scheme against me,
conspiring against my life.

Brought low, my voice becomes incorporeal –
the voice of a ghost;
from the dust my speech shall whisper…
yet still, I hear the many –
whispering from every side.

a quadrille (44 words) written in response to the prompt at dVerse Poets Pub – “whisper” – and drawing loosely on the text of Psalm 31:13 and Isaiah 29:4