This is where you’ll find me
Between here
and here
Author: Janna Hill
Wordless Wednesday (Coastal)
Go ahead and share this.
Wordless Wednesday (Gone Fishing )
Go ahead and share this.
Wordless Wednesday (I Kissed a Prince)
Go ahead and share this.
Wordless Wednessday (Leader of the Pack)
Go ahead and share this.
A Poem & A Picture (Why Poetry)
Well this wraps up my contribution for April 2016 National Poetry Month but remember, you do not need a special occasion to appreciate poetry. A poem a day keeps doldrums away.
Why Poetry
by Janna Hill
Because it hurts deeper
Tastes sweeter
Laughs louder
And lets me know I’m alive
Go ahead and share this.
A Poem & A Picture (Hemingway’s Beloved)
Hemingway’s Beloved
by Janna Hill
Did you shake his hand – the hand of a man’s man?
Did you see how his eyes searched the space around him as the world grew smaller?
Did you learn the secrets of Africa or discuss his tomes over drinks?
Of course not.
You could not for we were mere children – our wedding day marking the twenty second anniversary of his exodus… his rise to immortality.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year you were born – did you know that?
I was but two months in the womb when he placed the beloved twelve gauge inside his mouth and obliterated the ciphering pheasants once and for all.
Did you see how he caressed her? How her cold, soft metal against his finger was as pacifying as the perfect daiquiri… how she (his beloved) alas cured him of the demons.
In a flash she rooted them loose one by one from their hiding place – a place liquor nor currents could mole; a cavern so deep no joule or watt could grasp. Ahh but she did.
She exorcised them, set them to flight riding on soft grey tissue laden with hemochromatosis and fragments of bone.
Christ might have offered the fiends a swine but not her or better yet not him…
A sacrifice for the Bay of Pigs?
It was all such folly — such unholy madness for a simple man and a literary saint.
* Hemingway’s Beloved appeared in HWA Poetry Showcase Volume 1
Go ahead and share this.
A Poem & A Picture (Getting Me Back)
Getting Me Back
by Janna Hill
Tissue thin transparent bits and pieces by the millions I gave to you…
To be received, to be tended or to be rendered useless,
as you deemed fit old inhabitants of terra firma.
Slivers of my soul….
What did you do with these pieces of me?
Where are the misplaced microscopic stars of my spirit, where are they laid?
Did they dissolve beneath a soft autumn rain? Or burn in the heat of a cruel summer day?
Were they consumed by the dust mites of fate?
Giving me away was easy…
getting me back seems nearly impossible.
I saw a fleck of glitter this morning, caught in an abandoned web of time.
I retrieved it ever so carefully, pulling away the tiny choking strands;
polishing it in the palm of my hand till it shone bright like a minuscule star…
exploding…
and I recognized it as the twinkle I once saw in a smiling photo of me.
Go ahead and share this.
A Poem & A Picture (The Essence of a Poet)
I mentioned reading this in The Voices of Our Future a couple of years ago.
The Essence of a Poet
by Janna Hill
The thing that forces them to write
When flaming words from head take flight
What sees them through a wakeful night
The burning soul of a poet
The gentle eyes that make them see
The deeper beauty of a tree
And grieve for things that should not be
The tender heart of a poet
The unseen thing that makes them vie
That lures a tear drop from their eye
That prods them till the day they die
The fate of every poet
Though some may write with sticks on sand
While others write with pen in hand
A million keyboards strike commands
For the essence of a poet
Go ahead and share this.
A Poem & A Picture (Madre’s Mexican Blackbird)
Madre’s Mexican Blackbird
by Janna Hill
She reins me in
Her strong swollen hands tangled inside an unruly mane
Uno ! Dos! Isilencio! Tres!
Three dull thumps convince me to hush
and settle between beefy thighs
Gnarled fingers of assurance tug at my scalp
She plaits my hair with promises
Wisdom weaved among coarse strands of unnumbered mañanas
My head is left tender and spinning
with knitted rows of old wives tales.
**For the final week of NPM I will be posting my own poetry, a mix of published and unpublished. Is that selfish? Yes. Yes, it is. It is also easier — and right now I need easy.
I am grateful to everyone who submitted or suggested a poem. Hopefully we will do it again next year.
The Real Janna Hill in 