Tag: NaPoWriMo

Posted in Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #11

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The Librarian

Miss Alice wore cardigans trimmed in lace,
and plain, brown skirts that draped
her manly shoes, her bunned hair
a perfect circle at the base
of a long, thin neck. Her head swiveled
like a ball on a stick, her horn-rimmed eyes
piercing every cranny of the dusty shelves,
the world she ruled in whispers.

We children plagued her rainy days
and any time the frozen wind blew.
The young men, their chins covered
with fuzzy bristles, made Miss Alice’s ears,
turnips on each side of her round head,
blotch red, their speaking glances
at the girls in bright dresses the prelude
to the secret contact in dark corners
that made the older woman’s eyes bulge
the few times Miss Alice left her desk
to pounce on them.

That desk, with its mounds of books,
piles of history and science and truths
sweated out like blood,
rose around Miss Alice like a fort,
like the walls around her heart,
her hidden organ, tucked inside the drawer
with all her dog-eared romances
and locked away.

Her thin nose and sharp eyes were always there,
as we worked our way through Judy Blume,
grew into Hemingway and books almost banned,
brought our own children to haunt
her disciplined aisles, watching them
gawk at her, eyes wide, silenced
by the swivel of her now grey head.

Her children, bound and musty,
could not keep her warm nights,
tucked in her flannel gown, a hidden treasure
perched on her belly, her only love story
the printed pages blurring just beyond
her thick, round lenses.

Ramona Levacy
April 11, 2013

Posted in Love, Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #10

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The Marriage Dance

When once we waltzed as one,
nothing went unsaid,
not praises plenty or sorrows,
the painful bursts of that
we should not utter, even what
we would take back,
all absolved, binding us
like the musical patterns we wove
in our living room carpet nights.

Now, the country between us
pitches and yaws like the cool breeze,
our constant companion, no middle ground,
only these miles of weeds and stickers,
our aloneness a wall we will not tackle.

This waltz by myself is not easy,
casting me in shadow, slicing the happy
of others to my heart’s core,
beating rapid rhythms around me,
as I lumber like one dancing in the dark.

Was it days blended into days,
sugared coffee and oatmeal and the sound
of the sprinkler splatting the back door,
that brought us to this black, soundless chasm?
Or was it forgetting to keep the music at our center
the One and Only keeper of the light?

Ramona Levacy
April 10, 2013

Posted in Christian Living, Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #9

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

To Know Him

Silence is a cool breeze tickling
skin warm from the sunlight,
grass blades licking earlobes lush
in paintbrush and dandelion,
a stream bubbling clear
just beyond reach,
the blue sky high above
and white along the edges.

Thoughts scurry, as fears breathe out
with the fall of the chest,
and oxygen warms the belly. Arms
flung sideways, the legs sink
into the clean, crisp earth,
letting go, holding nothing,
open to everything,
even the gentle whisp of a butterfly’s wing.

Knowing God means quiet places,
finding brooks in our mind’s crannies,
away from unholy treasures,
tucked in the deepest dark
where we are most surely and yet never
alone.

Ramona Levacy
April 9, 2013

Posted in Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #8

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

A Two-Step Dream

He loved her when once she danced,
skittering loops and lines
across a grit-smoothed floor,
her long, blond hair glinting white
against the strobes of lighted halls,
her skirts, always red, twirling ’round
her well-formed calves in rhythms
his heart tapped beats to.

Her heart, solid and cold, except when music
filled her senses, matched his footsteps
only when the band played, her breath
a hot promise on his ear lobes, as close
as ever she came to love.

In the circle of a dance floor,
they twirled and tangoed,
bobbing and weaving the maze
of nothing or all, forever dangling
between them like the twinkle
of gems that seal promises
so many never keep.

Now, tapping heels to any song
wafting past his easy chair, he thinks
of her lips, the plump, red orbs
just touching his cheek stubble,
the two-step all he’d ever know
of a full, gentle world.

Ramona Levacy
April 8, 2013

Posted in Christian Living, Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #7

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The Supplicant

They are just hands, cracked
as any work-worn skin might be,
the creases running in lines
telling stories of every lost dream
and hard-won victory.

Just looking, we see past the embedded dirt,
the scars stark white against tanned skin
so thick, even softness is just a memory.
These hands know pain, hold hurt
like a solid something, ease misery
with the lightest touch.

Only hands that have raised the crops
for the table or sewn the quilts
warming family beds feel the cold
on winter mornings as something
more than nature’s biting chill.

Clasped in yearning, these hands
have come as close to God
as any believer, stretched in faith
toward that something that binds us
each to the other, the surety of things hoped for,
the evidence of that not seen.

Ramona Levacy
April 7, 2013

Posted in Uncategorized

National Poetry Writing Month #6

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

So, what is truth?

In this age, where all we know
changes–Pluto is no planet,
and even snowflakes have doubles–
what makes truth wavers,
turning grey what once seemed
as solid as the rich soil
where all cornerstones were founded.

Born to a world that is new every morning,
we humans lack patience, search for sameness
in the dark corners of each day
where the silence of what is to come
makes our skin crawl.

This chaos makes us humble,
keeps our chests from exploding
from our height on the food chain.
On our knees, in the safest moments
of our reality, we will know truth,

remembering the words of the One,
the Master Designer, He whose comfort
knows no limits, who lights all dark places,
in whose arms Truth finds home.

Ramona Levacy
April 6, 2013

Posted in Uncategorized

For National Poetry Writing Month #5

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

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Eyes Full of Wonder

At Disney’s California Adventure “World of Color” Show

What makes us so quick to point out
flaws in each other, our words like bullets
ripping through yielding flesh?

What if we looked for the wonder
in others, like the eager way we’ll stand
for hours waiting to glimpse

the blast of colored water, shot
like cannons into the air above us
at a theme-park show, thirty minutes of awe

that we sacrificed hours and hard-earned
dollars to gawk and laud? Do we mock
the water for its splashing, or whine

about the night’s chill? No, our eyes
grow round with need, willing to believe
anything, our sighs for our ears only.

If only we could see beyond ourselves
with the same kind of love we look upon
the lights and fire of the planned pageantry,

if only the moats our eyes bear willingly
would not blind us to the glassy, glowing spectacle
that is this crazy, beloved world.

Ramona Levacy
April 5, 2013

Posted in Uncategorized

For National Poetry Writing Month #4

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

THE COWBOY: A TRUE STORY

The leather where he sits
creaks in time to rhythms
his mount alone has mastered.

He is no hero, no rugged mass
of chiseled steel with dimples that charm,
but young and alone, the only

age too wet behind the ears
to know better than these endless nights
riding fences. The distant streaks

of lightening promise drenched misery or death,
his lone friend a dumb beast
prone to flight and always itchy

to be fed. No mother dreams this
for her baby, but he has long since
forgotten the feel of her soft lips

against his forehead, except perhaps
in lullabies he sings nights,
his cattle bumping bodies round and dusty,

his tuneless voice the difference
between a deadly stampede or a sunrise
filled with stiff coffee and his cloudy breath.

Posted in Poetry

National Poetry Writing Month #3

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Feline Logic

Lapping threads of raindrops from eaves
weathered beyond repair, their creaking crevices
evidence of owners long-since buried,
he too exists without an owning,
his past and future looped
in the now,

in the flick of his quick, pink tongue
against the cold, unsure pinging of this day’s
gift from the sky, his ears pinned
in different directions, this skill,
like so many he has mastered,
his only defense of his perilous place
on this food chain.

Today is all he has ever had,
is all he will ever know
of an un-shrunk belly and the warm earth,
pawed and circled to fullness,
that is his definition of happy.

He leaps from the worn fence, his thirst
already forgotten. One front paw stretches
and then another, his backside rising
in a curve that could only be a gift
from His maker. He crouches
into the stealth that has brought him this far,
sniffs the air with practiced nostrils,
and steps into the new,

his knowing the envy
of every someone who has lain awake
counting unhatched chickens
or re-living torrents of emotion
like streams that flow forever.

Ramona Levacy
April 3, 2013

Posted in Poetry

Like A Drop Of Wonder

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

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What about the frothy water,
churning molecules from mostly murky depths,
makes even landlocked hearts flutter?

Is it the broad horizon, stretched into white,
broken only by the slick backs of mammals
grown huge and perfect in a world
even man has not yet conquered?

Or is it the promise of something
undiscovered, a final country so vast
that even what tickles our bare toes
as they wiggle in the uncountable
are drops of salty knowing that will
come and go a thousand times
before we pass into the realm of no more?

This world where balance equals motion,
where survival means wind shifting,
belies the challenge of land living,
makes us feel our smallness and face
our own knobby knees.

Even if the cool wind touches
our salty skin like a whisper,
even when the silence thunders
like the voice of God.

Ramona Levacy
April 2, 2013