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haiku (3) after Hallowtide
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seasons ending in
new seasons beginning to
take hold then let go
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red leaves like children
bright and shiny always changing
into something else
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evergreen until
needles wither due to lack
of water and air
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C L Couch
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Red of Fall
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
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The Glass No Longer Darkly
(for All Souls’ Day)
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I’ve been too busy
With the living,
Not to praise that
Habit
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The dead have frightened me
When they are active
With the living
Like the Twilight Zone episode
That used to scare me,
The one with the telephone line
Fallen against the grave
And the dead calling
A living relative
Or the one in the Old West
With the peddler selling
Magic to bring back
The family members
To the living
In a town
And then charged more
To keep the dead, dead
And they return,
Anyway
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That sounds comic, I suppose
But the dead used to scare me
Not so much now
Experience, I guess
And a constructive belief
In afterlife
And the agenda of their own;
They will be busy,
After
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The sacred and the secular
All Saints’ comes ‘round
It doesn’t have to be so somber
In fact, there will be picnics
By the graves
In Mexico
And elsewhere
Commemoration
Remembrance
By the families
Who know how to love
On either side
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C L Couch
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Fotografía de una calavera de azúcar, típica en México.
By Pedro Moga – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22536159
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The Storyist
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Today is
After Hallowe’en
Liturgically, it’s All Saints’
And we sang a song
About the saints
At church,
Which is pretty much
What I knew
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Tomorrow is the liturgy
For those who died
To this life
And that is what I know
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But that for the intimately acquainted
There will be
Costumes and posadas
Special food
Meals in families
At gravesides,
The beauty of illumination
In the formal way we say it
An idiom
Half-euphemistic
The quick and the dead
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No, the dead
Are not so fast
And so we have to go to them
Except when they’re supernal—then
They’re the fastest
They might not heed
Friction,
They’re so fast
Faster than Earth turning
(a thousand miles an hour)
Or the thrumming of moth wings
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Who knows?
Maybe light speed
So fast, then,
As candlelight
And, too,
So easy
As wings
To those having wings
Now fast and easy
Visit us,
Love us
In older
And in newer ways
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The living and the dead
All mooshed together
In new minutes
In new ministries
Of grace and understanding
Could be without the understanding
For those who simply love
Who illuminate
The graveside
From all sides
With love
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And in the families
Of two or three or many more
Quick and dead
In all conditions
Hear and tell
Old and new stories
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C L Couch
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I came across a novel called The Last Cuentista. It was only the cover—I don’t yet have the book. And so I don’t know its own story (yet) but thought about an Anglo word in translation (for this Anglo) that might be Storyist. Don’t worry, spell-check doesn’t like it. (Or Cuentista.)
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The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera, published by Piccadilly Press
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Photo by Camellia Yang on Unsplash
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with apologies for what I do not understand but write about, anyway
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clcouch123 
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