Susan Dale |
Published: December 2nd, 2015
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Susan dale’s poems and fiction are on WestWard Quarterly, Hurricane Press, Ken *Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Garbanzo, and Linden Avenue. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan. She has two published chapbooks on the internet: Spaces Among Spaces by and Bending the Spaces of Time by Barometric Pressure.
Check out Susan's fiction piece that was published on Howl!
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In the Begining
In the beginning before there was day
There was a shadowed moon Barring herself Behind the dreams Through which we all pass One over the other Carrying our little deaths with us Ghosts never awoken Traveling the nights Paralyzed to eternity Nights where winds breathe A long black low Until archangels with swords Slice time to a faint light That calls to riptide oceans And they bubble with new life Pulse and throb To part to a spit of land Rising in between
Mother Moon and I
Conceived in the swollen rivers
Of the milky way I am one with mother moon Waxing, waning, And wandering with her Amongst the seamless heavens Here tonight; tomorrow there Following her alabaster lights She, bending the space of time And I, with space, falling into time The moon, a god-servant of the sun And I, a slave to the throbbing Pulse of the earth Both or us, mother moon and daughter Spiral with trillions of stars And angels’ wings Deep into creation.
Pale Country of Long Snow
Being drawn from myself
like pennies from a pocket Crash into a wall of nothingness then fall like snowflakes gently into ghost clouds Passing darkly, quickly, close to the earth _____to a pale country of long snow Unraveling a web of dreams In icy mist, I hang over all of it The lean wolf night Hollow haunches howling to the moon Owl eyes Close as breath to the snowy scene My arms stretched over murmurs of wind fingers of fog Come, the night watchmen We wear long cloaks and carry lanterns with lit candles of flames bending to the wind Lamplights wear halos of ice crystals To throw shadows across a sacrosanct stillness Not having Wanting most And what the mind desires It creates Mirror-ice pond Giving back the image of a skater: lone and drawing the night around in a shroud To himself By himself A shell of silence An all-around absent The watchmen whisper to me I whisper to me “It’s him.“ But I can’t be sure Doubt runs parallel with hope Hard lines of depth and width overshadow the skater going around ____ to around In the mind Before it exists Above, to below I try to move closer To see To know But the snow is deep Distance wide The image, ‘a snow-mirage,’ I wonder Within the white emptiness Of dreams going deep Further away and fading I sigh: I realize: I know Feet and legs having tread down hard roads Many and long eventually trip on rocks of reality No longer will they Can they Walk backwards in time
Comes Time
Blue seams of the heavens severed
Rages of an eternal sea And the stars’ wild screams Blazing through skies Glaciers rolling through time Boulders splintering terrains Winds shouting storms Winds humming tranquil verses of rain The clay molded from dreams Awakened to hungry souls with empty arms And the hearts held in bone-stone loneness From burning hearts came Rings of fire that encircled man And his daughters walking barefoot paths Beneath the many faces of the sun After false springs and empty darkness Came a flash of dawn And a child who waited under the rain Came a slow measure of the moon Throats of song Plumes of goddess clouds Sprouting pistils of yearning Came sunrise molded in delicate tracings To warm a seaside holding The thin sands of time Came the arteries of a river Clothed in mist The larva of longing That hung on to hope Through bitter winters and precarious springs Came comets and restless seraphim Came the summer ferias we followed To the crossroads Of turmoil to life
A Moon Child Poem
From the far off skies dripping with star-shine
Spilling into to fill the cracks and crevices of winter nights There, within a cocoon of the milky-way I unwrapped myself in hop-skip February, A silent frosty sliver of a month Slipping between numb-cold January and the awakening winds of March Then was I strapped onto a shooting star and raced with her in triple star time to come to an earth I felt throbbing with life. And the star burning in her race towards death smoked into charred ash. before she could tell me to whom I belonged And so I wondered and wandered. Not knowing I was a moon child Conceived in a far-off night that teetered between the precipice of a throbbing earth and the cold, far-away stars of February. I knew the distant stars by distant memories I carried of the times when I swam in the streams that foamed with the poems I unknowingly carried to earth. The earth I fell into. And pulsated with her in her rhythms of birth, life, and death. But never did I belong here Sometimes I left the ever-constant earth Escaped and carried along by the crescent moon who missed me, her vagabond child Gathering me up in her pale shroud, she sailed with me over the milky way streams carrying the poems I captured to bring to earth. |