Tag: d’verse

Being able to give… the greatest blessing.

I can smile and skip and scurry in hurry along the winding road

I can speak, chide and compliment and listen to lighten your load

I have food work and sustenance and a humble comfortable abode.

 

I am blessed with unfaltering hope and love and wings to fly

And distant dreams to share and amazing opportunities to try

And firm friendships love and family that death will always defy.

 

My family are a blessing and they give me hope each and every day

When I am lost they give me sense of purpose and help me find my way

They are my anchor in stormy weather when I would rather run away.

 

May you find your inner strength in the gifts of love you receive

May you give back compassionately to those who are in need

And remember that the most bountiful blessing is in the deed.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

This was created in response to Paul Scribbles poetics challenge for d’Verse on the theme of blessings.

 

Lai Lines

Angst and angry throes

And Midsummer Woes

June blue

Sadness overflows

Dark Depression shows

Blue you

When Nobody knows

Just how raw it blows

Breakthrough.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

Still playing around with the lai concept for d’Verse...whilst watching the early votes come in……

This Old House

Blot on the landscape

Ugliest house drapes

Lime green

 

Garden not shipshape

A narrow escape

hygiene

 

Dirty old milk crate

For a garden gate

Rats’ dream.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

 

A light-hearted attempt at a Lai for d’Verse….not as easy as it looks…and my first ever…

Insomnia

Can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking

Can’t stop worrying about the drinking

The bills, the wolf howling at the door

The need to always give that little bit more

Buster’s new shoes, Molly’s lose tooth

Worn out carpets on our worn out floors

Can’t sleep woes, Can’t sleep blues

If you know me well enough avoid me in the morning

As I’ll have the can’t sleep short fuse.

Insomnia.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

Written today for d’Verse... we had to save a life on an issue…I chose can’t sleep which I am sure affects many people a lot of the time.

The clock never stops

Antique Clock

The clock never stops

tick tock tick tock

He thought it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things

It was only a moment of anger and uttered words of hurt

But now they would always be the last words he said.

Why hadn’t he blurted out he loved her instead.

 

©Alison Jean Hankinson

I wrote this a while back but I am using it for open link night at d’Verse as it has been a moment that continues to haunt me, the idea that we often don’t know what those last words will be or when the last moment will happen and that we have so little control over it all, the clock never stops…

I took the image from flickr Rachael Towne- Antique clock.

Kestrel

common_kestrel_in_flight

Virtue her’s is beauty

She hesitates then pounces

And in a flounce of majesty

A reverie of gracefulness

Swoops to savage the delicacies of a dew-sodden dawn

Reap the rewards of a cold rancid morn.

 

Narcotic silence

Renders love unto my soul

Removes the talons from my heart

Her beauty numbs the pain of death.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

d’Verse open link

This is for the open link night at d’verse.

The image is  Common Kestrel in flight from wikimedia.

Sunset on Mount Tiger

A house is not a home if it isn’t in your heart.

A house is not a home if it isn’t the place that lifts your dreams

And makes you smile and puts the gladness in your eyes

When the sun sinks in the west and the summer lingers on.

 

Our Mount Tiger home was filled with love and kindness

They all belonged, the children laughing, the turbid teens,

The thieving possums, lonely pheasants and quirky quails,

The irritating huhu bugs, mesmerising puriri moths and startled skinks.

 

Our house was small but wore a warm place in our  hearts

Our lives were kneaded and fashioned and left to prove in the sun.

Going home at the end of the day was like a long slow sigh

As the work was left behind and we were back where we belonged.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

 

d’Verse poetics

The challenge for poetics was to write about a building and we were really supposed to create it. This was our home on Mount Tiger, a small rectangular box atop a hill with a steep acre of bush, and we were the visitors the custodians of the land, we shared our home and landscape with all who had come before us and thrived around us. We had lavender for the bees, wildflowers for the butterflies, cabbages for the caterpillars, and I think the birds and rabbits lived off my vegetable garden. It was a beautiful home for my family to grow up in. We didn’t build it but we did grow it.

 

Transcendental Glory at Morecambe Superdrome

Echoes in our heart and footprints in the sand

Staccato and tremolo of Tijuana brass

Morecambe Superdome with Don Lusher, a silver black Scirocco

Alan Tomlinson Conductor and lead of our bluesy big-time band

Children of Sanchez, superb shrill of trumpet solo

Transcendental glory in times gone by.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

This was my treasure for the poetics challenge. I wish I could let you hear Alan Tomlinson playing Children of Sanchez…. mind you to hear him play anything was a gift. His repertoire and range were exceptional and his passion for music and desire to pass it on to anyone especially young people were equally as exceptional. I played with the LCBB from about 1981-1985….

It was the most magical period of my young existence. As a young trombonist and big band member it was the pinnacle and zenith of my life and career. We played at the Morecambe Superdrome and supported Don Lusher…Stardust was his melody… and I had made it. This was the moment of exaltation when you know that it just doesn’t get any better and Alan Tomlinson hit that note in Children of Sanchez and you know this is the moment in life that you were born to notice. Transcendental Glory at Morecambe Superdrome.

Prose poem at the bar….all at once….it was a complex week… my memento..

Web about Alan Tomlinson…

Stuart GRILLS AND ALAN tOMLINSON

memento

prose poetry

 

For both poetics and prose at the bar…

 

Re-integration

We are treated as vagrants

worthless souls with no right to belong

It feels like someone is playing with our lives

having a giggle at our expense

One step forward ten steps back

and even though we were born here there is no recompense.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

This is for Monday Quadrille at d’Verse

d’Verse quadrille

What am I?

 

15996217_10211603035136919_1868470194_n

I am the face of hope,

In the fast fading light.

 

I am the distant dream

Driving forwards, when the day draws to a close,

The Star-bright shining in a suburban sultry night.

 

I am the laughter and the tears, the fear and guilt and pain,

Felt by all the mothers before me, the broken and the humbled, the joyous and loving,

I am the seed, the seedling, the roots, trunk and branches.

I bear the fruit. I am the womb of time.

 

I am me, fifty and finally come of age, woman.

 

Alison Jean Hankinson

 

It is open link night #190 at d’Verse and so we are encouraged to submit anything we choose, this was part of something I wrote a while back, and I guess it is what I need to believe at the moment. Returning and coming home has been nothing short of gruelling, nothing has been simple at all. It has been a little like hurling yourself from a small cliff into a ferocious and stormy ocean. I have to know deep down that it will come right and that the storm will pass. To do this I have to peel back the layers and remind myself of what I believe I am and then slowly start to pick myself up again.

The image is Ellen and the tree- the second version…and my children are very much a symbol of what I am.