A Poem a Day (710): Simply blue

 
Simply blue
 
We stand in line upon the sinking time,
curiosity’s stilted mime, this out-of-focus line,
a make-believe that we can be something more,
people in a bottle in a box outside of time,
tripping colour of a something folded outline.
 
The sea curses no one, crashes out sublime
& we are struck dumb by its stark silence.
 
Mindful are we, who we are, who you are,
of the mind, out of mind, even out of sound,
& we are pained by the squares of the round,
yet what we seek is here, not out of time,
it hasn’t crossed the line, so make it mine.
 
Tour the swift seas wide, your wanderings beguiled,
invisible wand, tempest torn, the unbroken wild,
sensing what can’t be seen, hearing every distant shore,
begat, begot, wanting less simply to become more,
free in your lost time, woken now, endure and done.
 
The ocean hears what the ocean wants & needs,
feels what it is, puzzles it out, churns it all inside,
& we are but ghosts watching as dark waters reside,
our audience calm, a woven quilt, all linked beside,
the breadth of us suspended within our sacred breath.
 
Vickie Johnstone, February 12, 2025

A Poem a Day (709): The dip in the book

The dip in the book
 
She colours outside the edges
where ink gathers to explode
the traces of places been & faces seen,
to reinvent every missing moment.
 
She strikes all the right notes,
gets the time right to offer a smile,
offers advice when it isn’t even needed,
struggles to keep her own counsel.
 
She magicks night awake sometimes,
takes flight upon starlight’s ocean streams,
a-wandering in and out of time,
seeks to reorder the crazy things she’s seen.
 
She rewrites every story she’s ever read,
so no implosions, only happy endings.
Meaning lies in the waking hour,
but it’s groundless when she forgets to dream.
 
Vickie Johnstone, February 12, 2025

A Poem a Day (708): Pilgrims

 
Pilgrims
 
Stranger in a stranger land,
shapeless forms on shifting sands,
 
the awake and ever-searching self,
a walk without an end in sight.
 
We leave our bags at the airport,
abandon our shoes in the ocean,
 
fly a kite only to see where it takes us,
pursue our wanderings into tomorrow.
 
We set sail and hope never to return,
wish away our whole life on a maybe,
 
rock the times just to stay true to our souls,
dig deep inside to find the thing to live for.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 2, 2025

A Poem a Day (707): Flames

 
Flames
 
In air,
as in water,
unwritten. Unsaid.
Fire curls the edges of wrath,
flames without a phoenix.
 
Turrets scurry in mist,
a drawbridge with no end.
This path divides and redivides
into a soar of mountains.
And then it’s gone.
 
It’s not a game. It never was.
Aces high, delusion low.
Fire breathes a lion’s soul.
 
Seeds of a dandelion travel far,
blown on languorous breeze,
for there is movement.

Otherwise, all is stasis,
all is illusion. Just coal.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 2, 2025

A Poem a Day (706): Moths

 
Moths
 
In the cocoon,
lair of the moth,
quiet watches the moon rise,
the shift in the cosmos,
a shaking of time.
 
Fireworks explode
this eaten-out horizon,
a drifting sand expanse untrod.
We are but blighted stars,
torn strips of gravity.
 
In the cocoon,
he watches the spaces
betwixt knowing and exempt,
as though all the light is cried out
and the ocean churns to drown.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025

A Poem a Day (705): Journeying

 
Journeying
 
From rock to blade of grass
to bark to stone to living water,
this glistening, a rapture to spring,
an endeavour to be more, not less,
to flower, aspire, to be.
 
Soundless, the tallest tree bends
to air, speaks a language only
the river knows, and our feet sink
into mossy roots, a juncture read,
seek to walk the breath of nature.
 
We glimpse our own raw nakedness
without the weight of ourselves,
to travel light in pursuit of this missing part.
We measure each footprint we make
lest we leave too deep a mark.
 
In coming here we aspire to soar as birds,
unbridled, leaves shielding us from glare.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025
 

A Poem a Day (704): The machine

 
The machine
 
A broken thread,
it cannot be gathered
or rejoined, extinguished
sound. The pathway, once clear,
eats noise, the teeth of the machine,
a Singer with no tune.
 
Life waits at the edges of
shunted cloth, pushed forth at pace.
But the link is gone.
 
The hole in the fabric blinks,
a chasm without light. It pulls
and you feel it sometimes. But cloth,
it cannot feel, they say. You can’t feel
what you never had.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025

A Poem a Day (703): Water, fire, air

 
Water, fire, air
 
In essence,
the sense of something
idealised, unrealised, tragic.
Reason is, as was,
as is the presence of absence.
 
Where we are stood, a tree.
It bows in blessing to the moon.
 
Struck, we rewind,
let slide, ourselves, on broken snow,
for we are how we never were,
upside, key side, the fallen out,
belief suspends. A yearning box.
 
A pool of water reflects.
Fire extinguishes. Air betrays.
 
Known is only a remnant
of the thing, pulled out in opposites,
never warned, and ever lost we sleep
in knowing nothing is as meant to be.
But we are human. Undesigned.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025

A Poem a Day (702): Unbound clay

 
Unbound clay
 
Here is the morrow,
a looking glass of blended stone,
the disappearance of sorrow,
a vanishing act you cannot borrow.
 
Echoes blind, bind and set you free.
This path is twisted, so let it be,
cross the seldom bridge at your leisure
so you may finally see the distancing,
 
a way of shifting all the light within.
Call forth an image of the life you want
and do not despair in a broken box.
Pure water flows. It does not stick.
 
They impound, set nature’s rhythm back.
Stand up against the wall and be counted
even if the brick is all you can touch.
Scorched, ache in the draft of being seen.
 
Seas flow, and seas crush, and seas ebb.
We feel the breath in setting things free.
Cast a line across the shore and seek shine,
deepset in the emotions you need to release.
 
If the life-giver stretches out a hand to dance,
we can only grasp it, be still in wonder,
for we are sculpture, moulded by hand,
dreamers in a world we do not seek to own.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025

A Poem a Day (701): Bended boughs

 
Bended boughs
 
Sweet timeless things dwell in magic,
blood-scarlet tape and starlight hands,
we wrestle darkness into sunk oblivion,
tread streams of light to the next world.
 
The fae breathes life into the forbidden forest,
adorned in moss, girdled in stripped bark,
sips morning dew from a cup of leaves.
Nothing lives that she might dread in nature;
 
it twists and writhes, weaves her entire story out,
one to be handed down in scoops of words.
Through the shape of air she draws a picture,
dreamt of the one she would adore if known.
 
Then, shielded by this startling blast of rain,
hair drenched, she stands taller than the boughs,
waits for an arc of vibrant colour to paint itself
in this blued-out, carved-up, blinded sky.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, February 1, 2025

A Poem a Day (700): Jagged

 
Jagged
 
The sky is a jagged blue sometimes.
Red letters etch from A to Z,
stop midway. We curse the light,
prefer the night, the edgeway,
a belief we can still be something.
 
Echoes imprint within our souls,
linked til we share this open blue.
We eat alone in restaurants,
listening to the rain wipe music.
 
Too much of this time relies on instinct,
a guess skimmed across a silent lake.
 
We pour what we are out of our being
in a bid to connect & we are generous
with our selves, nothing to hide.
 
Laid bare, we spin records of old bands,
play back the way we were before.
There are echoes, so we draw a curtain.
There are even times we echo too.
 
The magician walks a tightrope to the sky,
pulls a white rabbit from a stiff hat.
 
A girl watches it scamp, twitch its nose,
recalls her six-year-old self on a tiny farm,
holding this life in her bare arms,
grins at her mother loitering in the dark.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, January 15, 2025

A Poem a Day (699): December train poems

 

Canvases

The water-bearer revels in blue,
scoops dripping earth in supple hands,
smells the drenched woven moss
where gravel paths traipse under waking stars.
Globules streak down silent canvases,
ideas woken by a single thought.
Somewhere, an urn will empty out,
its ridges worn by the prints of fingers,
an individual script of the heart.
We stroke passion with a palette knife.

The shark
 
Stone-grey on pristine sand, sunk in,
stripped bare of watery hands,
smooth backbone, ribless hide,
curved yet curveless, as if at rest,
land-ripped and swum out,
its etched prints obliterated
by human feet and racing paws.

Whole, it drifted in on the wrung tide,
mortally wounded. It lingers now
in black and white review,
almost entertainment, an awakening
to the fate of the oceans deep.
We remain as a shield, all muttering
our five-minute silence beneath sound.
 

Bookends

Motion breaks, swift recall,
steam exhausts, fuels a language
written in grey out of jest.

The watchers stand as bookends,
nod like magpies, silenced out.

Idle hands accomplish nothing new
without inspiration, a truce.

We lend knowledge unwritten,
a dial without a single number,
the contrary grown so fine
that no line exists at all.
 

The lamb

Dew-set, the open track yawns,
awaits the entry of the crop.

A lone lamb stands adrift of the flock,
stares down a valley of wildflowers.
Clouds flick their pearl cirrus wave.

Forlorn trees, a jive of limbs,
signposts to the effervescent breeze.

A red hand marks her hide,
the stamp of ownership too loud
to be forgotten. It stands forgiven.

In ignorance, the flock devour
the land, fail to check her wandering path,
leading her far from these verdant hills.
 
 

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, December 2024
 
 

A Poem a Day (698): Womankind

 
Womankind

Curves etched from baking sand.
A scarlet desert in my mind
births stripped leaves of emerald green.
So I am known. The sky the shyest tint
of ocean blue, burning anew,
washing me of all I thought I ever knew.
And so we stand in the full wide open,
arms outspread, eyes tightly closed,
for we are here, newly awakened.
We feel the sun’s hands on our faces,
the warmest breath of air,
and the knowledge we are loved.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, December 22, 2024

A Poem a Day (697): Sound bath

 
Sound bath

A tone-out, zone-out,
pure rush of layer upon layer spent,
this slide of water gushing out.
Bubbles flatten into spiral calm,
transport you high into starry realms
entering into dark. A step-out,
a tearing out of the humdrum
thoughts & echoes of your mind
until there is no movement,
only quiet, afloat on the ripples
where you dream sometime to be.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, December 21, 2024