Practice

By Rhiannon Corretto – 10 May 2019

 

It’s a practice,
This every day
Heart Beating
Journey.
It’s a practice to expel the air
From your lungs
In the hopes that,
In the daring that,
There will be air
Graced to you
To fill them up again

It’s a practice
To let a word in,
Let it reverberate within
The shadows of you,
To stir up something
That may be scarier than
When it stirs up nothing…
Because what if
The word has a will
And you follow it
Like a ravelled thread
To a Truth
That no one else can understand
And even you aren’t ready for?
It’s never guaranteed…

It’s a practice
To trust
To fling yourself into the Arms
Of Love and Life,
To dance and let the gravity of grief go
And maybe be caught…
And maybe not…

It is a practice to live
Because nothing is perfect
Except the chance…

 

This poem was written as part of Five Minute Friday. This week’s #fmfparty prompt was “Practice”.

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Seeing Red…

 

by Rhiannon C Hall

 

The streets run red
From brokenness and blindness,
From self-destructive hate of Other,

And yet,
Can you point out
Which pool and spill
Came from you?
Which came from me?
From “us”?
Or from “them”?

You can only revel
In the power of your anger
That painted our world red
Because it wasn’t only your blood that was shed…

But, if we are one creation,
Wasn’t it?

 

Born Without a Whisper

By Rhiannon C. Hall – August 2017

We have many births in life
As we cross thresholds of strange doors
We could never fathom opening
And we
Become
A piece of ourselves
We’ve always held…

I was born when I fell
Into the mud,
When I was pushed
Beyond my balance
And landed
Into a foreign space
Of laughter
And jeering,
Because I stood up…
Bloodied
And changed

I was born when I closed
My eyes into a dream of
Wings feathered with words
That stretched to the horizons
And let me shed the weight of reality
With each turning page

I was born
When I met you,
When your smile
Was my first breath
Filling my lungs
With a tomorrow
I didn’t know I wouldn’t see

And I was born
When I woke up to that day
Without you

And I was born
With tears and screaming
And seven pounds of
Why am I here?
And how many bitter pills
Until this ends?

And I was born
In the clinging to one more day
And one more chance
And one more prayer
To make this dance beautiful
Despite my graceless feet
And clumsy songs

And I was born
Without a whisper
As I knew that I was moving
Beyond who I was
And into who I could be
And that any given moment
Could be the next birth,
The next life,
The next incarnation of who I am
And who I’ve always held
Somewhere inside…

There’s a song I’ve loved for ages called “When I Reach the Place I’m Going”. It was recorded both by Wynonna (Judd) and by Patty Loveless. As the years progress, I find deeper and deeper meaning to each line. But, there is one line, “I was born without a whisper”, that seems to resonate anew with every new season in my life. I played the song the other night and that line brought up so many images from different times or rebirth and I had to sit down and write.

 

Trying…

By Rhiannon C Hall – 4 August 2017

I take a deep breath,
Try to squint at the swirl of words
In my heart and
Pick out just one
That makes sense,
That resonates with the Truth
That I seek from You.

I’d anchored down the word I didn’t want to hear
Because I KNEW You wouldn’t say it;
And as long as it was an option,
It would fog my vision.
As I stared into the turbulence
That ebbed and flowed around
The questions
That seem unanswerable,
You resurrected
From the deep
The One,
Having loosed it’s chain
From the weight of all the pain
From all the hope deferred…

And it took my breath away…

But still I try
To accept the word
That I didn’t want to hear
As Your answer,
And still I try
To see its resonance
With the evidence
And trust that Your ways
Are higher than mine…

 

 

This poem was written as part of Five Minute Friday. This week’s #fmfparty prompt was “Try”. It’s interesting to me to see what happens with the half a thought that I can almost grasp when I set the timer for five minutes and try to write. When the timer beeps, I’m usually a little surprised. I know this piece is not what I intended it to be, but it may be exactly what it needed to be…

 

Collect

By Rhiannon C Hall – 21 July 2017

 

I look at my empty hands

Freshly freed from their beloved burdens

And I wish this season were more about collecting

Than letting go…

And I wish I could even hold my wishes,

But they slip through my grasp

Like the smoke accompanying the genie

From the lamp…

And in the emptiness I hold,

I see it,

I see what I have gained

Through all this loss:

The scars,

The tough and tender reminders

Of thorns

And wrestling

With what could have been

A meant to be

Or maybe always was

A never was…

And I close my hand

And feel the skin

Flex and stretch,

Ready to hold its destiny,

Ready to be seen

In its perfect reality,

Stripped bare and empty…

 

 

(This poem was written in 5 minutes as part of Five Minute Friday. The prompt was “Collect”.)

 

Tomorrow

poem by Rhiannon C Hall – 26 June 2017

The sun will come out
And shine on the world
When something I’ve dreamed of,
Something I’ve clung to
Through years of darkness,
Begins
Tomorrow…

Something I’ve worked for,
Hoped for,
Been scared of,
And cried so many tears over,
Will start
Tomorrow…

I’m watching the hours count down until
Tomorrow,
But it has been unfolding for so long…
Each and every today that has danced through my life
Has been a step along
The journey,
And tomorrow is merely another step.

I will leave my comfort zone.
I will step beyond a line
Of never again being able to say:
“I’ve never”
Or “I’ve always wanted”,
And my foot will fall into the space of:
“I am”
And “I have”…
When
Tomorrow
Becomes
Today…

 

What Poetry Is

by Rhiannon Hall – (c) 2017

You can ask what poetry is
But brace yourself,
The answer is probably along the lines of
“I don’t know”
And if anyone tells you a solid answer
You can throw that solid thing back at them

The truth is
Poetry

Poetry is truth
But not a truth that always makes sense
Not a truth that can be paraded around
As information

Poetry is
Life
And creation
And wonder

You can write words
In short and random
Choppy
Sentence
Lack-of-structures

Or pleased to keep time
And a measure of rhyme
You can alter the rules
Or fall strictly in line

But even these
Do not carry a guarantee
That the finished product
Is anything at all
Unless
It feels like poetry

Can you feel the brushstrokes
Of the words and the spaces
As a picture is painted
Around you?

Can you savour the flavour
Of metaphor
As it drips across your tongue
And melts into sticky pools
In your soul?

Do you cringe at the harshly lit
Revelations
When it denies you
The freedom of turning your glance
From seeing yourself in its open wounds?

Poetry is a lace curtain
Blowing in the breeze
That never fully blocks out your reality
Of light and darkness
But gauzes overlaid
And flutters the vision
Between your world and mine
And your world
And mine
Are the same and never the same
And the tatted threads
Draw lines around those aspects
And give us insights
That bind our hearts with open-weaved strands
That forever tint our landscape views
In beautifully painful honesty

And somewhere amid all the substance
And lack thereof
You’ll find what poetry is…

 

The Battle Rages On…

By Rhiannon C Hall (c) 2017

 

She watched the sun
Slip behind the world
Clawing bloody trails of lingering
Across all that could be clung to
With its empty caress

She felt her heart
Not siding with the death
But without a flutter to fight
For its lost cause against darkness
Stealing in again

The air blew around
Stirred the scent of sleep
And cool memories that sting
When you aren’t expecting them
To nibble at your mind

And she hated the dark
She hated the way
It stripped away the distractions
And she wished she’d fought a little more
But she closed her eyes

And seconds stretched
Into a bleak eternity
Each aching moment barely letting
Breath carry her into the next
And into the next

She watched the darkness
Turn to gauze and whispers
She felt the charge of cavalry stampede
Against the crawling endlessness and claim
Victory for another day…

 

Wanderer’s Warning

By Rhiannon C. Hall – (c) 2017

 

The cattails thrum repeatedly on
The haunted hollow fallen log
And echo in the misty gloaming
Heightened by the thickening fog

The bullfrog’s croakings drowning out
The gurgling mud and muck that traps
The boots of every hopeful wanderer
Daring trod an unworn path

The mossy scent of ages gone
Entwines within the traveler’s soul
And anchors them with burdened doubt
Until relinquishing control

They let their fate and destiny
Fall dead amongst the ragged reeds
And in the stillness watch them rot
Alongside their forgotten dreams

A warning caution to us all
When in the snare of swampy trials
Let us boldly charge ahead
Through every aching, stumbling mile

And let us not succumb to what
So many others have before
For just beyond the darkened hellscape
Lies the goal we’re striving towards

 

Future

by Rhiannon C. Hall – (c) 2017

 

Spinning-top confusion
As I’m stuck inside a snowglobe
Looking out into the wild
But the glass is fogging over
From my panicked pounding heart
And gasping lungs

All the puzzle pieces floating,
Random in the vortex
And I can’t see what’s coming
And You say to watch
As all the bits will slow
And fall so gracefully
Into divine and perfect places
Where Your holy Wisdom
Planned them always drift
Into a landscape that will
Take my breath away
With it’s beauty
And meant-to-be-ness

Do you see the tears well up
And pour forth when I’m in this water?
Do You know the aches
And dreams
And all the shattered parts
I’m trying to hold together
While I wait and see if one day
They will all make sense?

And You whisper, “hope”
And You call out, “Trust”
And You sing to me, “wait”
And all I want to know is:
Will all of this disaster
Be worth the future that You promise?

 

 

 

This is a piece for Five Minute Friday. Today’s prompt was “future” and the goal is to free write for 5 minutes and stop. Feel free to check them out on twitter at #fmfparty on Thursday evenings.