Truth

I am that thing you dance
to evade in neat little steps
that go sideways.
Underneath rocks you will suddenly
find me, the boulder smeared with a
thousand scurrying excuses.
You see me with double vision,
and smell me coming like hot grease.
Along the wide horizon
you try to hide me in the dark.
I come in whispers excavated
from seductive corners, in corpses
popping up in parks.
I am in fibers and nail clippings.
I rise, bloated to the surface, rancid,
staring with my mouth agape.
I always win. Time provides persuasion
and motives.
I arrive with knives.
Magnetic, I will find you.
There is no escaping me.
I am that psychic force you fear,
gnawing at your belly in the night, restless
as a lizard emerging from its shell.
I bring bats caverning your conscience.
I am Forever.

Van Gogh

Across sienna fantasies
brush strokes recall
an indigo mania.
Violet dreams lead
to sandstorms of sunflowers
blazoning declarations.
Within a mottled field
a sower haunts
a sea of ochres.
Spinning forever are
stars lost in hungry vigils.
A day becomes a thousand
frenetic aspirations.
Colours rage,
alive, extraordinary,
and race across a crazed horizon.
Tormented palettes crash
into eternal canvasses finding
no audience.
A mind becomes a relentless passion,
stung by fiery demons.
Lost amid seven hundred paintings
a man
expires,
an anonymous nightmare.

Grandmother Gardens

Cheeks
flushed like the garnet side
of a peach,
Grandmother toils, her elation
the peppers, shining like Christmas
ornaments.
Strawberries have already shoved out
their flecked insistent chins.
Rows of tomatoes promise
a jolly summer.
Potatoes slumber.
Devil clay resists like cement but
yet from this unyielding foe
dance lavatera.
Gypsophila confetti beside roses,
sunny as musk melons.
Nicotiana delights.
All these things are paced
in time--this staggering beauty
will stage wild ovations as the stout,
straw-hatted goddess with a limp
coaxes this sanctuary as effortlessly
as her wise old fingers
raise bread and charm with cinnamon.

Carol Ramsden Deckert is a former winner of Canadian Author & Bookman's poetry contest. A collection of her poetry was read on radio by Sheila Martindale on the program "Cabbages and Kings" in London, Ontario. She has published poems in Canadian Author & Bookman, and is included in a poetry collection entitled "Voices From the Niagara" (Moonstone Press). Her poems have also appeared in Tower Poetry Journal and in the professional teaching journal, "Indirections." Her short stories and articles on the craft of writing have been published in "Indirections" on many occasions. One of her short stories, "Canaries Have Wings" was circulated to forty countries in a journal for educators of gifted children: "Gifted International." Carol formerly graduated with a Masters Degree in English from McMaster University where her poetry won a "Special Achievement Award." Presently she is Head of English at Orchard Park Secondary School in Hamilton, Ontario.

Email: Carol Ramsden Deckert

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