In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Place.
This could be anywhere. Or could it? It’s not anywhere anyway. It’s Eastern Europe. Not eastern Europe with a lower-case e as a geographical region, but Eastern Europe capitalised as a former political unit (aka Eastern Bloc), which still retains its sociocultural characteristics today. Why should you care? Oh, you shouldn’t! Unless you’re into places in the middle of nowhere. That’s where my place is. Nowhere. I’m saying, not complaining.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Unlikely.
Most unlikely things happen in airport hotel diners. Such as me finding myself in one.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Prolific.
The prompt prolific can be interpreted as pro-life. It’s in there: pro-lific and pro-life. Looks like these two might have something in common, right?
I’m not speaking of pro-life in the sense of anti-abortion—let’s not even look in that direction. It’s pro-life more in the sense of obsessively bringing things to life. Regardless of whether said things wish to be alive in the first place or would rather choose not to.
Spring is a quintessentially prolific season, hence my tulip photo. I never post tulips while omitting to quote my pet poet Sylvia Plath. I think I get her, or she gets me, whichever way you put it. She wasn’t particularly pro-life, which we have in common, as manifested by her choice to quit and put her head in the oven. And since we live in an age when you can’t say anything without offending someone, please let it be recorded that I’m not pro-suicide. Which is quite a feat, for a suicidal person.
But now, rest your eyes on the tulips and consider how they feel. That’s how tulips feel to Plath:
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Awakening.
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
—Louis MacNeice
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Smile.
I colour. Colour is used as a verb here. I do not identify myself with colour, as in I am a colour. Though, if I were a colour, I’d totally be pitch-black.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Favourite Place.
To be miniaturised is not small-minded.
To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells—
Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect
Still boundless, chip of a nation.
—Robert Crawford
Guess my favourite place!
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: I’d Rather Be.
I’d rather not be, but if I had to be, I’d rather be my cat.
In response to WP Weekly Photo Challenge: Story.
Not much of a photo, but a potential for story here. The story of the lost ball; or, the art of losing stuff.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
—Elizabeth Bishop
Mara Eastern 