Writing: a poem I wrote in cw class

The Pelican Brush                                                                                                                                            

Christina's poem she wrote. Not about anyone in particular. :) 

1.

The old afternoon woman from the tiny hut,

was dressed in her crisp white gull feather

blouse. Collecting urchins, coral and shells for the grinding stones was tedious work and she stopped to glare at me as the pure intense colors of the atmosphere whipped sharply at her back. She kneeled in the calm water eyes perceiving wisdom on the horizon. She was searching for the black jaguar when she looked back and said, “Don’t you tell me that anymore.”

She left speaking to the disarray of shadows

as the instinctive rumbling at the base of the

mountain extricated the night air and 

pain flooded the old woman’s eyes in remembrance. “What grandmother? What don’t you want me to tell?” “That you don’t care. You do care. I saw it last night

in your blue water color tears and pelican brush.”

 2. Later, when the sea grass was laid flat

and tiny chandelier lamps were fireflies

lighting the crisp stalks the old woman grimaced. She was far away from the stipples and streaks burning the landscape with flashes

from the lighthouse, but she could feel the grief. She was shaking her finger in the night air

Beneath the moon at the base of the rumbling

Mountain and rolling waves, as she pointed at me And said, “She is dumb like faded stars.

All the grown children are at this time.

It is because of the black jaguar.

She was always stealing things for kids like me,

writing poetry into the soft breeze and binding

down the black jaguar to the ship and sending

him off to sea. There are no lines in this natural landscape, only vibrant colors grappling for space and it is because of her.  

3.

But I couldn’t get the blood out in the rich

red veins, it was always the blue quills that

filled the paper and my tray. Even with all

my faulty logic of tying my heart to my tongue

and writing with the pen the dividing line still

shimmered impressions of a passage still shifting in time beneath the cerulean waves and

artificial light that permeated grandmother’s

kitchen. The water color tray always filled with

blue and not red, as the old woman had suggested. Even the love could not escape and breathe the air.

When the men came back, he was in the distance of the surrounding atmosphere of physics lending Light to the clarity of focus. Suddenly the transience of the natural world blew out the light. The night wind

Was at my back, pounding my flesh. I remembered her words, “you care, don’t tell me you don’t care.” I let the man

pick me up, like a stranger in the night, he kissed my lips. The pelican brush dropped and whisked into the ocean where I could hear the slow soft hum of grandmother rumbling her emotions from the base of the mountain, “I told you that you cared,” The black jaguar drowned in the ocean that night in the sunken ship.