Beauty

Like a tree in bright green bud, a child, even newly born
Delights the eyes with a simple beauty it’s hard not to adore.
Small limbs’ quest to walk and run drives a perfection of form
But growing up, they somehow learn a desperate need for more.

Struggling for light and air like jungle parasites
Beauties strive obsessively to be the fashion queen
And see the glamour of their faces lit by dazzling lights.
But envy, greed and artifice kill the beauty that is unseen.

Piercing, plucking, preening and perming, delicate daubing with dye
Gel and heat conspiring to tame long hair’s luxuriant coils
Applying torture devices even to the lashes of the eye!
All obscuring the natural beauty that time cannot despoil.

The softer light of real beauty shines gently from inside
And has nothing to do with the brilliant glare of tungsten or halide

This sonnet was inspired by the picture above, the Monday Mural at Poefusion, which is by Alizarin at Deviant Art. You can see what other poets have made of the same prompt in the comments at Poefusion.

And I’m celebrating, because I’ve completed my own NaPoWriMo – thirty-one poems in the month of July – three days early! It’s been an interesting journey to write so prolifically, but really hasn’t been a struggle, particularly with the help of some excellent prompts (look at the rainbow of prompt links in my sidebar!). Some of the poems are weaker than others, and they would all benefit from more polishing. But I’ve learnt a lot about writing in the process – and had a lot of fun expressing some ideas that interest me, or matter deeply. Which is really the point!

Church of the old mermaids

 

A lonely stretch of grey-damp shingle, roofed only by the endless night
Is altared and hallowed by the vestal flame of the guiding harbour lights
Secret and sacred, in each moon’s darkness, slipping sideways from the foam
The ancient mermaids gather to celebrate the endless world they roam.

There they lounge upon the shore, seductive, salt-scaled and single
Voices soft above the sound of the wave-shifted shingle.
Sharing quietly their tales and trophies from their scouring of the deep -
The wildness of the ocean surge, the softness of a man asleep.

Shedding their tails, they proudly arise, and in the guise of an innocent maid
Each shares her deepest nature’s gift with a sailor (who’ll boast of getting laid).
The sacred service duly completed, their hearts yearn for the ocean flows
Where each mermaid wanders, leaving a trail of beauty wherever she goes.

While the waves caress an empty beach, strewn with glinting scales
Where the hard stones lie in sensuous curves, hollowed out by mermaid tails.

…
… 

I came across the phrase “Church of the old mermaids” on Endicott Redux, and thought that it would be an interesting idea for a poem. And then I came across the picture above on Rick Mobb’s blog and decided that it was a poem I had to write.

Of love, dreams… and frogs.

I’m fed up with the idea of kissing frogs in the hope they’ll turn into princes. It’s all part of the feminine myth that we need to go and change men – to tolerate them and reform them until we get our reward by changing them into a prince. I’ve had enough of the idea that I can solve someone else’s problems by setting aside mine. If someone can’t solve their own problems, or is at such a difficult stage in the process that they lash out at those around them, then no patience or love of mine can change them.

Which isn’t to say that I’m demanding a prince, either. One of my favourite of Robin McKinley’s retellings of the story of Beauty and the Beast ends with the beast not transformed into a prince, but remaining as a lovable Beast – as the heroine says, “I love my Beast, and would be very unhappy if someone were to take him away and leave me with a handsome stranger in his place”. People are flawed, and not fairytale perfect. And they deserve to be loved warts and all!

I want to find someone who is strong enough in themselves that their light shines through despite their flaws. Someone who will not squirt poison at me if I get too close or try to touch them the wrong way. Someone who I can love as they are without always living in hope of a magical transformation of those flaws. Someone who takes responsibility for his own problems, and does not try to take his pain out on me.

Is this a mad dream? It reminds me of the song Sapo Cancionero, about a toad adoring the moon – the message of the song is that life would be sad without illusions. And even if the dreams never come true, it is important to dream.

And yet I’m not just a toad with delusions of grandeur. By no means! I have come to know my own light, my own strength and attractiveness. There’s a strange contradictoriness in the feminine myths – as well as the woman who saves frogs through her kisses, we’re also encouraged to be both the moon (remote and pure and passively adored) and the adoring toad that looks up to the shining example of manhood in the sky above her. I’ve been trapped by both these myths simultaneously, and neither is at all helpful in having an authentic relationship.

I am not perfect, but neither am ugly or earthbound. I am a frog whose inner light shines like the moon. A light of inner strength and beauty that outshines the warts of my weaknesses and fears.

I want to fall in love with another frog whose inner glow outshines their warts. Not someone whose warts I need to ignore or transform, but which in some way are part of the lovable whole. Someone whose warts feel like my warts too.

And while I’m not going to sit by the pond waiting passively to find that frog, I’m also not going to settle for less. I’d rather hop around the swamp in an endless quest for the right frog than settle down in the mud with the wrong one.

Yes, life would be sad if lived without illusions. But it’s also important not to underestimate our own strength, and worth, and beauty. A frog, in its way, can be just as beautiful as the moon, so long as it is content to be itself.

 

This is another writing practice on a topic from red ravine – this week on frogs and toads. I was rather surprised by the direction it took me in.

The beautiful picture, which also appears in the youtube video of the song, is called Moon Viewing Frog by Hikari Hirose, and was loaded onto flickr by berczeller.

Reflections of eternity

As promised, here is another of the photos I took last weekend with my new camera:

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror” – Khalil Gibran