Ekphrastic Challenge 2

Weird Wonderful, by Wendy Ratawa

 

MILLEFIORI
TRISHA GENT

Dumbfounded, her vision swims and distorts
Colluding with the glassy, glossy colours that flick and cavort and meld
Inundating her senses and caressing; oh the sensuality
Seducing her with their kaleidoscopic ways.

Last reachable memory, she had been draped over her bed
But not now. Now she was enveloped, shimmering and flowing
A bauble in a millefiori river, patterned and proud
Aquamarine here; indigo there; cartwheeling tangerine and somersaulting scarlet.

Her mind struggles to pinpoint some rational thought
But this is impossibly unachievable
Her heart is telling her to let go of reason, abandon structure
Her eyes are telling her to surrender to the beauty, sink blissfully.

She regains composure, reluctantly
Trying to give some coherent description, surely this is what’s required
Ah, too late, she has fallen again; or rather, more like tumbled
Into the visual liquidity.

Recognition – was that a … ?
She’s sure she just saw a …
It was like psychedelic cloud-watching; shapeshifting; colour dreams
No hope of steering a train of thought here.

She decides that some things are not to be described
Defying categorisation and unrequiring of definition
This thing is experience; immersion; floatation
Intimate. Erotic. Visceral.

At last, she gives in, fully, thoroughly
Rippling with the pleasure of simply drinking it in
She can formulate only two words
She silently mouths, weird wonderful.

 

SEARCHING 2
JULIE RYSDALE

And there before her shone threads of sapphire, ruby and the golden sun, tangled with the silk of mermaid’s hair. A memory taking shape in each wild creative strand.

The ocean landscape choked with colours of her dreams to search, to find, to trace her pathway home: she was reminded of places she had never known.

She glided on soft light as lithe as air, guiding her to the moon’s embrace. Above wild and rainbow seas she sailed bold and crimson tides, glorious swathes of glistening sapphired streams, curving upward to the stars.

The rivers spiked with eels of gold, lost in mazes that long entwined; ice shards of ridges cracked and urged her on. Silken mermaid’s hair caressed her skin, her shroud of sapphire, ruby and lustrous golden webs.

Was this her dawning to realms unknown?

Her final journey to the stars, alone.

 

on my mind
jo curtain

 

 

SIESTA
SIOUX PATULLO

What are isobars anyway? We watch the forecast on telly, but most of us still can’t read a weather map. Just as incomprehensible is the map of our brain. As well as sending and receiving vital messages, our brains sort clues for us, and try to direct us using the process of intuition. Our brains are constantly reading the energy around us, just as a barometer reads air pressure.

When we are in a foreign city with no map to go by, and it’s pouring with rain, the streets devoid of help, we have no choice but to navigate by feeling. There I am. Lost in Barcelona. Long before Google showed up and stamped out any hope intuition might have had in the first place. The city is closed for siesta, the roller doors shut on every shop. I’m not concerned except for finding somewhere to wait out the rain. What is it that we are following when we are headed nowhere in particular?

I descend some stone, white stairs onto a small portico that looks like a ditch. Siesta is a porthole for intuition. She divulges nothing. I can hear faint music and I follow. Along the ditch, I find an opening in the city. I peer in. The music is coming from a small radio. Slightly drowned by the rain, hammers heavy rock. A crowd of silent faces stare up at me, as if I am late for a meeting and they are waiting for me to explain. They are sitting in a circle, listening intently to the music as if it is informing them of lost family. I am the rain. I wet the concrete step as I pass over it into the dim room. I feel at home, because of the intensity of their listening. I sit down within the circle, and try to listen too, the heavy rain a generator to our gathering.

It strikes me that I might be hearing a religious service or a funeral. By now I have sunk into the leather armchair and am not in a hurry to be back on the concrete threshold. If I was listening to narrative, or football, or even opera I could take a light hold on understanding, but I am thrown no rescue. I forget everything I know and settle into sweet curiosity. Logic has no place here. I’m expecting a break, in the rain or the music, but expectation is not the same as intuition. I like these serious strangers and I don’t need proof of anything. I close my eyes and feel a rain-drop drift down the back of my neck.

When I open my eyes there is no rain. The group is dispersing with kind smiles in my direction. One of them turns off the radio and I can hear roller doors beginning to stammer all over the city. Isobars in simplest terms, are lines on a map that represent atmospheric pressure. Beyond that, they are almost impossible to understand.

 

IMAGINATION STRINGS
MICHAEL CAINS

Twenty six dimensions,
If you believe Bosonic Theory.
We can imagine but four,
and struggle with five.
Rampaging confusion makes our heads spin.

Applying Jordan algebra to octonionic matrices, 
postulating a four dimensional physical spacetime plus 
a four dimensional internal symmetry space, 
with eight first-generation fermion anti-particles….
Drone, drone, groan….

Me to Earth: “Are you still with me?”
(I thought not. Me neither).

So we paint.
Capturing colours and shapes, or
Bosonic dimensions
drawn from our minds –
Onto rocks. Sand. Paper. Or screens.
No need for Space and Time,
Or an overwhelming vastness.
We have our limitless imaginations.

Let go. 
Drift.
Unfocused,
imaginings.

Multiple variants of dimensions of String Theory,
vibrating elementary particles, 
photons, electrons, and gravitrons.

Captured forever, to be shared.
As art?
What to me is not yours,
Our unique imaginations,
create thought pieces and fantasies,
so differently.
Strings of colour need no words or numbers
to represent theory and
other dimensions.
Made wonderful, and magical,
Inside our heads.

 

THE BOY WHO WANTED PAPER AND PENCILS
ANNA MEEHAN (AGE 7)

 

ALL THAT IS
GISELLE SIM

Within everything there is nothing
The desperate confusion
The perfect chaos

The beauty of it all
Bursting delectable array
Of possibility and emptiness

All united as one entity
And yet a collection of many
Unknowing of its true source

Not to remember
It is what it is
The master sees no wrong

Continues into nothing
Becoming everything
No reason to worry

 

GIFT
GEOFFREY GASKILL

At the sight of her mother’s handwriting on the brown paper wrapping of the parcel, Amy’s tummy fluttered.

By the feel of it, the contents were soft. Memories, long gone or suppressed, battled for attention. She thought she’d gone past grieving. But now, with this … Maybe you never get over it, she thought.

The brown paper crackled as she ran her hands over it. Opening the parcel she spied the Joseph’s-coat-of-many-colours-scarf she’d always admired when she was a kid. Her mother had worn it till it all but fell apart. Amy thought it long lost yet here it was.

With care, as she held up the old and frayed thing, a folded piece of paper fluttered to the ground. Amy examined the familiar spidery script. It was no longer as firm and assured as it had been in all those school notes her mother had written regarding Amy’s absence or permission for Amy to do … this or that activity. Even so, as wonky as it now looked, a reader wouldn’t dare question the strength of the woman who held the pen.

She unfolded the paper. ‘Dear Amy,’ the note began, ‘if you are reading this, you will be holding that scarf of mine you always admired. Scarf might be a generous description of it now.’

Amy fingered the colourful material. It was pretty tatty she had to admit. Nothing like the garment her mother had worn with such flair on those occasions she went out ‘to a dance’ or ‘to dinner’ or the myriad of other places a busy woman would go when dressing up was required.

The swirling and kaleidoscopic colours spoke of youthful spirit. The scarf and she had been inseparable. They’d grown old together until …

The symbolism was disturbing.

‘I’d like you to see it,’ the message continued, ‘as a kind of pastiche of my life though I’m not about to give details. Even parents have a right to privacy. It’s enough to say you might be shocked to know the details of the things, for good or ill, I’ve done. My scarf might look flimsy now, but it is made of sterner stuff than I am. Those colours can speak for me now. Your job is to work out what they mean.’

Amy pressed the scarf to her face. Her mother’s smell imbued the fabric. Here was her mother in all her contradictions. The colours and the chaotic shapes burned themselves into her mind. Maybe Amy would never know exactly what those reds and turquoises and purples meant. But it didn’t matter. They spoke of a life lived–a good life.

As she rewrapped the scarf and her mother’s last words, Amy paused. When my time comes, she thought, and if I have to decide one thing to represent my life to my children, I wonder what will it be?    

 

MIND MAP
JENNY FUNSTON

Where will I go?
How do I get there?
Caught in a web of colour, lines, intersections.
Myriad decisions cloud my mind.
Imagine,
Close your eyes
Take a step, two steps,
How does it feel?
Scary!
Change, change now
let the inner colours guide,
Trust the patterns, the geometry
to take you home.

 

ALL IN A MORNING’S WORK
CATHERINE BELL

She peers through the café window, surveys the scene with an experienced eagle eye, then makes a quick decision.

Slipping inside, unnoticed in her inner-city greys, she blends seamlessly into the café’s crowded courtyard.

She sees two women, in their early thirties, perched on high wooden stools in the far corner. Hunched over their coffees, talking earnestly, they appear enveloped in a tantalising veil of secrecy.

The decision is easy for her. The women become her morning prey.

She slides into the spare seat less than a metre away from them.

The taller woman is dressed in a kaleidoscope of turquoise, vermillion, emerald and gold. Her cropped, blonde hair, streaked in brilliant pink, stands to attention like a Bird of Paradise. She gesticulates wildly, bobbing up and down on her stool, and her entire body becomes a blaze of colour and movement.

She leads the conversation.

Her companion has a rounded, pudding-like body, and short stockinged legs that are crossed neatly under the table. Her long, dark, free-form hair is dull and tied loosely at the nape of her neck. She looks glum and defeated. The light has gone out of her eyes.

The women are oblivious to the eavesdropper settling in.

She sits at the next table, right angles to the young women, ensuring a discreet view of them. Eyes narrowing and jaw clenched, she focuses on her task. A freshly sharpened pencil and crisp new notebook are arranged in front of her ready to start the day.

The Bird of Paradise in a raspy, nightclub voice, continually questions the near-broken woman, encouraging her to divulge more and more details.

Did you ring him? Did you explain?

The other woman shuffles uncomfortably on her stool.

He’s the boss. I’ll lose my job. But he made me really angry.

The Bird of Paradise continues the interrogation.

But what did you do then?

Her companion’s voice fades away to a whisper.

I just wanted to end the conversation. I told him I’m not taking it anymore.

The Bird of Paradise forcefully stabs the table with her forefinger.

It’s a disgrace. You tell him it’s not on.

The eavesdropper scribbles down these windfalls. Snippets of salacious asides and irresistible details. She gobbles up the morsels, like a sparrow fossicking for crumbs on the table, and quickly weaves each newly stolen gem into a patchwork of snatches, scraps, and half-finished sentences.

Snooping, spying, she is a master of surveillance.

Burning with curiosity, she strains to catch more of the story. It soon becomes her story. What will happen next? What will he say?

The two women finish their coffees. They are still deep in conversation when they abruptly leave the courtyard.

The eavesdropper slumps down into her chair and closes her notebook.

A sly smile spreads across her face.

She has the kernel of a new story.

  JOHN HERITAGE

 

NO WAR
S.D. HINTON

 

⚠️

WARNING: DRUG USE

 

Harry followed the supplier down an alley between buildings, bought a small bag of crystals and glass pipe fit for purpose.

‘Enjoy yourself,’ the supplier said slipping the cash into his satchel and walking away.

Harry didn’t leave the dead-end alley, its grubby brick walls sheer to the sky, he went deeper, past a commercial sized rubbish skip on wheels ripe with the stench of rotting stuff and sat on a milk crate surrounded by fag ends from a problem smoker.

He’d seen meth smoked before but never done it personally, had always viewed it too hard core for his occasional dance with recreational drugs of choice. But things had changed. More precisely, he’d changed.

Hard core drugs were exactly what was needed for this particular job. A cause-and-effect match. He needed a superhuman hit of euphoria, enough dopamine to drown the mess in his head. Strangle its neck. Obliterate it. And nothing flooded the human brain with dopamine like crystal meth.

He slipped off his backpack and rested against the wall behind, ran eyes over the blunt end of the alley. Not the greatest place for his first meth experience, dank, dim, heavy with old spores and echoes. Water dripped and small things scurried. Bit like losing your virginity to a street worker. Which when he thought about it, was probably quite fitting.

He opened the bag, tipped several fat crystals that looked like dirty snowflakes into the bowl of the pipe. Pocketed the bag and pulled out a disposable lighter, passed the flame under the bowl, rotated it in half circles. Crystals collapsed into liquid, simmered, gave off vapour. He took a steadying breath. Do it. Pressed his lips around the glass tube and inhaled deep and bitter, held, let go.

Tick, tick. Boom!

Crisp colours flashed and darted. Dots formed, shifted, bumped into each other, expanded like technicolour bacteria in a petri dish, popping like balloons under what looked like thrown black blades. A psychedelic spectacular.

 

When Harry came back into the alley, he was staring at a fairy floss sky, head tilted back against the wall, breathing fast. He rocked forward, found his boots. Man. That hit much harder and faster than he’d been expecting.

He felt fantastic. No mind chatter, no angry fire under his skin, only crisp colours and clear light. He felt weightless, like a leaf floating from a tree, sawing back and forth in perfectly still air. Wouldn’t’ve been surprised if little bluebirds had glided in and whistled him a happy tune. Even the bluestone pitchers on the alley floor looked fresh and clean.

He felt alive like he hadn’t for years, if he’d been able to stand — which he didn’t intend to attempt for a bit — he would’ve punched air and whooped. That’s when he realised, not only had his mind gone quiet, so had his physical pain, his hip felt like it’d never been blown to pieces. Afghanistan hadn’t happened. There’d been no war.

 

KALEIDOSCOPE
IAN STEWART

Dreaming
The fluid flow of colour
My mind accepts during sleep
Wakefulness brings on memory
Oil on water
Slipping, flowing colours flash and jangle
As light plays it tricks

Or is it a rumpled quilt
Gathered, squashed
No longer square
Or is it just
A cunning play of light
Kaleidoscopic
Weird and wonderful