Don’t look back

Don’t look back

the psychiatrist said,

the past is here in the present.

With your help, we’ll make a story of it.

It may go back before your birth,

what your parents wanted for you,

their unlived lives.

It will take a long, long time

and a lot of money.

© Valerie Taylor

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Don’t Look Back

“A word to the wise: don’t look back.

“Why?  Because they are following us.  Whispering, conniving, hatching schemes.  Believe you me, knives and tongues are being sharpened.   And they’re cunning and getting closer

“What!  You looked?  And no-one there you say? 

“That’s strange.  They definitely were when I turned round.”

© Tim Scott

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To write is to serve, to put your heart and soul into service.

"To write is to serve, to put your heart and soul into service. Who do you serve? The collective human heart and soul, the inner life of others.

Like all service, writing is hard work. You must funnel reams of words through your fingers, laying down sentences like an athlete lays down miles. You must go on your knees to the mysteries of creation, like a priest before the altar.

You must develop practices that cocoon your inner, imaginative life, protecting it from assaults by the outer world — including your own longings for money and fame — so you can keep on giving. You must read widely, and emulate writing masters, until you’ve worked out what it is that only you can say.

And how you’re going to say it.

Do all this well and you’ll find your service to others also serves you, all the days of your writing life."

Joni Rodgers, founder of The LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY AUTHORS

The Cocoon of Creation

The Cocoon of Creation | By Orna Ross.: "To take time out of time. To stop thinking, pushing, striving, doing. To drop the drive of ego and allow something else to be."

Of our charity

If only we understood her need 
to meet herself a hundred times a day 

the bright assurance 
of my mother’s face 
in each and every room 
would be no trouble at all 

Our home would be filled 
with mirrors. Every inch of it 
a source of vanity

 - and doubt. 

© Sophia Roberts 
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MawganPorth: Summer, 1982

The couple sat on the edge of the lobster pink, cone crunching beach.  Black clad, androgenous, narcissistic.  Each was reflected in the other: pale, pixie face, cat green eyes, black hair close cropped at the side, spiky above and sweeping to the shoulder.

Don’t you want me baby?

She didn’t.

© Tim Scott

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Hold On Just a Little While Longer

Never ending scolding, not holding
Touch untender
Family dismember
Love surrender
Unfeeling, leaving the bleeding
Soul torn
Spirit shorn
Child worn.

Musing, losing the bruising
Mind detached
Dreams despatched
Can't be snatched 
Back. 

© Caroline Nicholson

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Mirror

                               Mirror

                      You think you know me? Can tell me who I am?

                           Mock dry my dreams, turn silver into grey

                                  With your unyielding glare?

                      You catch my light, yet light belies the shade,

                           The chiaroscuro hid beneath the folds.

                      You think you know me?

                            Then turn me round and look the other way.

© Sheila Rogers March 2012
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Mirror

Paper dolls cut from the same template

Four eyed reflection. One dark. One fair.

‘Are they twins?’ asked the teacher.

I feel her pain, she feels mine.

Who will steal whose toys?

I cut the join and the pieces

flutter, like confetti  looking

for a new settling place.

© Valerie Taylor

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Illusions

Caught within the bowl of the pond,

Cradled in the branches of an elm,

A swollen, golden moon.

Narcissus-like, I reach –

The water ripples,

Reflections shiver, melt, are gone.

So, sometimes, in the soft evening light,

My mirror yields a glimpse:

A girl, before life’s chances, choices,

Painted her firm.

© Gill Dunstan

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