Immemorial

 May 22, 2022 – journal

 

funny, I was here before,

with my long blond hair

and slender fingers,

reading, understanding maybe half

of everything, and falling

in love, which was wonderful

and also daunting as the word

'eternity' 

*

visiting for the day,

we walk downtown

after a nice dinner

and come to a sculpture,

a little girl sitting on a stack

of suitcases on the very spot

where people were once required

to register for internment –

a fact that wasn’t printed

in any of the books I read

when I was blond and slender

as a branch of Japonica 

*

I just realized

my time at the university

was almost halfway

between now and then,

nestled like a dream,

green as spring,

in the center of

Earth's seemingly

eternal flame

Hidden talents -- freewrite

May 12, 2026 – journal

 

My talent –

         wearing hats

                    cupping mugs

  scooting chairs closer to a sunny window

dreaming about underwater polar bear paws

                                 pulling sweaters over my head without

                         catching the petals of my big flower earrings in the yarn

               I'm not on your team, still

                     I thought of you when I watered the clay dianthus pot yesterday

like a rhinoceros

         in the snow

                            or maybe

                     the rocking horse on the porch

               that secretly knows how to neigh.

Isn’t It a Lovely Day To Be Caught in the Rain?

 

Freewrite inspired by I am the Horse by Ellen Welcker

Horse tries to take up tap dancing.

 

The teacher makes Horse repeat the beginner steps again and again in front of everyone. Even the dust motes stop floating to watch her lurch across the community school stage.

 

F-lap f-lap f-lap

the other students tap, feet as light as fairy wings.

 

Drag - thud - ugh,  drag - thud - ugh 

goes Horse.

 

Horse wants hay

Horse wants carrot and apple slaw

Horse wants to nuzzle a palm

Horse wants to be rubbed down

Horse wants to gallop over a field of violets

Horse wants to cantor up a dry road and make clouds of dust shaped like bunnies and frogs

Horse heads home and hears her hooves make the pretty music of raindrops on all the rocks along the river.

Freewrite to nowhere

 

Nowhere is a place, too,
with leafy trees
and traffic lights.

Someone has to put

dinner on the table

and do the washing up.

There are cardigans to button

and babies' earlobes

to nibble on.

And when the nowhere car 

is out of gas, we walk, walk, walk

past the nowhere coffee shops

and sidewalk tents

and dog parks,

the zinnia pots

chip wrappers,

bird splats

porch swings

wind chimes

ding-ding-a-ding.

In nowhere

we skip

all the way home

and cry and sing 

about all the nothings,

both sour and sweet.

Noodling with words while half-watching a movie on Hoopla

 

In this version,

I'm as comfortable as a sandwich

and can play all the parts:

the shoe

the fire

the violin

the dark.

Green is my thing.

Yellow is your color --

like a crayon sun.

Your rays won't quit.

You could grow

zinnias on the moon

with your spark.

Linda Ferguson

For Annamarie, again

For Valentine's Day, for shoe box mail boxes and construction paper hearts laced with packaged white doilies, for playgrounds and paste and pianos and parents, for long foal legs and new stiff shoes that clacked and clunked down the tiled hall, for Miss Knerr who showed us a black and white film of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 6th grade, for my friend, whom I met that year, just as we were on the brink of emerging from the cocoon of childhood, with those first tender beings still nestled within ourselves.

For Annamarie, on the Death of Her Husband 

\
~ Randal A. Burd, Jr.

“So we grow together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition…”
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is for you,
who once took me in
your wide child’s arms,
strawberry wool,
and tea in china cups,
spools of honey,
your little sisters
tumbling
like golden apples
over your bed,
the snowdrops
of your fingertips
on piano keys,
finding silver yearning
of Für Elise, dreams
unfurling from our pillows
like the peach ribbons
of a surprise party
or midsummer picnics
and the plummy pageantry
of Shakespeare’s rhymes
in the rose garden where
we romped and caught
our sleeves on the thorns
of adolescent naïveté.

Now, across a continent,
as your heart gasps
in grief’s cold tunnel
and clusters of friends
offer you tender
apricots of prayer,
may my voice be
a single petal
floating over miles of time
to land like a fingerprint
of sun on your hair,
for my words spring
from a heart that’s one half
of a double cherry
that still grows,
as ever,
next to yours.

This poem was originally published in Sparks of Calliope: A Journal of Poetic Obsesvations.

A freewrite that wonders if hope is a thing, feathered or otherwise

 January 25, 2026

 

AI tells me there is hope.

It says that hope can feel

distant at times, but that it's linked

to resilience and taking action.

It doesn't mention, though, 

all that's Good and Pretti.

And what does it say

about the state we’re in

that I would be

Googling such a thing

on a Sunday morning,

with refracted light 

shimmering on the threads 

of a spider web?

Linda Ferguson