Joni Mitchell- Coyote
The Band- The Last Waltz

“You just picked up a hitcher/ prisoner of the white lines on the freeway…”

This time it was easy, this time it was clean. We had a map. We had enough sense to separate business from pleasure.

Society imposes its guidelines. We could have re-written them, gone rogue, but we chose to follow the boilerplate. That’s what we signed- that was the contract.

Now it’s broken. No quarter was asked. No quarter was given.

Led Zeppelin- No Quarter

Jack Johnson ‘Sitting Waiting Wishing’

Your fingers linger. Traced along my meridians,
I run wild like fire.

Night’s blue darkness fades yellow, bruised tender,
she grieves the morning. His bright wide sky abjures
my merciless molting:

this skin you touched last shed hollow,
an emptied fugitive dream.

© 2013 Laura Levesque

Valkyrie

My turn to choose. To question is to meddle
with the fabric of the universe, and we might spill the stars.

Why send men to the moon? Why does there need to be a man
in that space balloon? Why launch the rockets, why burn
the skies, for dust we shall perish, within which
no answers lie.

My time to comfort you is gone. I’m astride my own horse now.
I’ve already flown.

Your head I’ve kissed one last time- marked you
for battle on the morrow. In the starfield you’ll lie slain,
separate forever from pain, from sorrow.

© 2013 Laura Levesque

April 26- and I’ve only made it to 18. This is a draft, and it won’t stay here long. But you get the gist of my thread, such as it is, this spring.

A Year on the Sun
Image Credit: NASA, Solar Dynamics Observatory
Explanation: Our solar system’s miasma of incandescent plasma, the Sun may look a little scary here. The picture is a composite of 25 images recorded in extreme ultraviolet light by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory between April 16, 2012 and April 15, 2013. The particular wavelength of light, 171 angstroms, shows emission from highly ionized iron atoms in the solar corona at a characteristic temperatures of about 600,000 kelvins (about 1 million degrees F). Girdling both sides of the equator during approach to maximum in the 11-year solar cycle, the solar active regions are laced with bright loops and arcs along magnetic field lines. Of course, a more familiar visible light view would show the bright active regions as groups of dark sunspots. Three years of Solar Dynamics Observatory images are compressed into this short video.

National Poetry Writing Month is under way. I am participating in the challenge this year with wonderful old friends, and some wonderful new friends, on a private board. The Academy of American Poets discussion boards are no longer functional.

I urge all of my creative friends to take the challenge, no matter your art or craft. Create something new every day in April- a new poem, drawing, painting, photograph, etc. Try to do it every day for thirty days. It’s a great way to establish discipline, and an ingrained habit.

since an ancient glacial violence
crept upon this glade, gouging

river valleys, receding into hills,
meadows, and quarries

where our kin knapped flint,
obsidian, hand axes and blades

hefted towards prey they would
exhaust, run down in the heat

of the day, outlast its bursts
and sprints, rendered helpless,

falling to our stone tools,
butchered for the cooking fire-

Then I’m the rock who witnessed this,
far more as the sky moved and changed,

stars rose and burst in the firmament,
men came again and again to mine

fine flakes, then ore, metal shaped
and ground against silent yielding

stone. Eyes of men deceive.
Whetstone wears, simple water quiet

as spring rain thins, this vernal
tide pulled, a stone struck one

too many times will fail, its heart
fractured in a flood’s torrent

dislodged and shattered
downstream.

© 2013 Laura Levesque

Quantum leap with me
where we could travel alone for a while,
companions of the Doctor, outrunning
mortality’s ticking clock, maybe
thumbing a ride out on a Firefly

If flood waters rise
above the lip of our valleys,
you’re the one I’d want along
to climb atop with, up the mountain
grade, share the lonely view

with the hawks and with me,
find another way to dance, be
in an empty room, no one’s backs
to bump into, no children about at
our knees, if there’s ever

a place called Jericho, I’ll steal
atop the wall at night,
and lower the scarlet rope
for you.

© 2013 Laura Levesque

Sakurajima Volcano with Lightning

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Rietze (Alien Landscapes on Planet Earth)Explanation: Why does a volcanic eruption sometimes create lightning? Pictured above, the Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting in early January. Magma bubbles so hot they glow shoot away as liquid rock bursts through the Earth’s surface from below. The above image is particularly notable, however, for the lightning bolts caught near the volcano’s summit. Why lightning occurs even in common thunderstorms remains a topic of research, and the cause of volcanic lightning is even less clear. Surely, lightning bolts help quench areas of opposite but separated electric charges. One hypothesis holds that catapulting magma bubbles or volcanic ash are themselves electrically charged, and by their motion create these separated areas. Other volcanic lightning episodes may be facilitated by charge-inducing collisions in volcanic dust. Lightning is usually occurring somewhere on Earth, typically over 40 times each second.