Month: July 2025

Provision

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

Provision is the title of the prose poem I share here, originally written to a nature prompt on Ethical ELA’s Open Write. A poet-friend suggested turning it into haibun by adding haiku at the end…Voilà.

It is July. The hummingbirds are drinking a whole feeder of sugar water a day. My friends say they have no hummingbirds this year and I joke that they are all coming to me. My granddaughters try to help me count, but, in all the frenetic zoomings from window to crape myrtle and every which way, we lose track: Is it seven? Ten? We cannot be sure, even though every bird has different markings. Most are female. One silvery girl has a red dot at her throat. This is somewhat rare, research reveals. I have taken to calling her The Princess. She was here last year. She has come home again to her own realm and it is my great pleasure to serve her.  A documentary tells me that every day of life is a combat zone for hummingbirds. I already know this; I am eyewitness to their fierce competition for food. I am occasionally startled by the sound of a tiny body slamming against the window—THUNK! — where the feeder hangs. How is it so loud? How does the body-slammed bird not die? The hummingbird’s awareness and aerial acrobatics are astonishing. Once in a while, a male finds his way to the feeder, his brilliant ruby-throat like nothing else in nature, as long as the light is right. His jewel-fire turns black in shadows. The women soon drive him away. They rule the feeder. I see females sometimes picking near-invisible insects off of its red plastic flowers, likely to carry to their young. I am thinking some of these birds hatched here in our trees last year. We have never had this many before. It is not hummingbird nature to “bring your friends.” They do not have friends. They are individuals. Loners. Warriors. As fierce and resilient as anything in the animal kingdom. They are, in their way, mightier than eagles. And they know me. I step outside to a helicopteresque whirrrr accompanied by loud chips and chitterings…food’s gone! they say, so hurry up, hurry UP. A bird hovers nearby as I rehang the feeder full of fresh, cool sugar-water, condensation already running down the glass, gleaming in the light. They are back at it before I can open the door to go inside. I do not expect their gratitude. Their love. Their allegiance. None of that is possible in this life. Their beauty and perseverance, their very presence, is enough. They perch on the twig-branches of the pines out back whenever I am on the deck, nearly indistinguisable from the pinecones. They are watching me, these tiny winged wonders of sublime iridescence and supreme intelligence. They know me. It is more than enough. 

The battle is Yours
—I trust Your sweet provision,
grace in every drop.

Shell we paint?

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

As the school year dwindled to a close, when bodies and souls were most tired, and brains and nerves most frazzled, our art teacher offered a little art therapy to staff.

She’d gathered oyster shells from the Rappahannock River (in my native state of Virginia) and bleached them until they were snowy-clean. She explained some of the barnacle-like formations on the shells: “These are where baby oysters landed and began growing.”

In that moment, I thought: All things connect. Art is biology. Biology is art. Always creating.

Once we selected shells, we chose napkins from our art teacher’s collection, bins upon bins of them, a ponderous assortment for which she was almost apologetic. The napkins were decorated with patterns of all kinds: birds, flowers, sea life, geometric shapes, and so forth. The point was to find something on a napkin that we liked and that would fit on the shell.

I chose a nautical napkin. Perhaps my subconscious wanted to stick with a theme; this was going on a shell, right? Plus, there was an octopus, a creature which captivates me. Normally I’d have searched for a seahorse. I love all the symbolism of the hippocampus in the sea correlating to the hippocampus in the brain (aside: I wrote a poem about hummingbirds yesterday and for the record, their hippocampus is significantly larger for their size, compared to other birds. Has a lot to do with their phenomenal spatial memory). But here was this blue octopus on the napkin, calling to me, with its arms (not “tentacles”) swirling all about it. Would it fit on the shell?

Following the teacher’s directions, I tore the napkin carefully, until the octopus was free. Yes—it would just fit! With a brush dabbed in Modge Podge, I attached the octopus to its new habitat, the interior of the shell. I left it awhile to dry and came back to paint the edges in gold – 14K gold, which my sweet friend the art teacher voluntarily dug out of her supplies for me.

“It’s so beautiful!” she said, eyes aglow.

“I love how the octopus arms drape over the sides of the shell,” I said.

“That,” said my art teacher friend, knowingly, “is the poetry of it.”

In that moment… I was awed.

Art is poetry. Poetry is art. Biology is life. Life…is poetry.

It all flows together, on and on, like the sea itself, does it not.

A prayer-ku:

open up my life
open up my arms, my shell
paint them with Your peace

*****

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Challenge
and to all the artists
and poets
who so enrich my life

Silky string: a memory

/ Fran Haley / 1 Comment

For Ethical ELA’s Open Write today, host Jennifer Guyor Jowett states this purpose: “We are going to tug at your memories, perhaps even look for a way to express that which is hidden.”

Jennifer goes on to share how Emma Parker, a textile and mixed-media artist from the UK, inspired her own poem: Emma Parker’s themes are “often around the broken, the abandoned, and the forgotten.” She explains that thread and cloth hold the metaphors of mending, repairing, and connecting and becomes interested in the stories the materials hold and who has touched them before.

Before I could even finish reading the rest of Jennifer’s intro and prompt, my mind was spiraling in countless directions. First, writing about memories. My favorite kind of writing. Second, themes of “the broken, abandoned, forgotten.” So much to say about that. Then the whole bit about fabric and cloth, mending and repairing… my mother was a seamstress. An image from my earliest days immediately came to mind for a poem, but the ideas do not stop there, no, not at all.

To be honest, I’ve spent much time thinking on the broken parts of life and generations of brokenness. Some people overcome while others are never able. So many stories in my own family and in my husband’s. I keep picking up the pieces in my mind, marveling at the incredible beauty of some, mourning over the ones beyond repair. Someday, someday…I will see what written mosaic I can make of these. Perhaps.

But for now, a poem with the first image that came to mind:

Silky String

Who
gave me
the blanket
trimmed with satin?
Someone receiving
a new baby to hold.
Did this someone ever know
that my sweet blanket, white as snow,
would become my babyhood lifeline
even as it all disintegrated?

-the blanket, that is, from too much loving.
Over time the satin pulled away
and someone (who?) tied it in knots
to keep it from being lost.
Priceless, my silky string,
for rubbing across
my nose, thumb in
mouth…soothing
me to
sleep.

Note: I didn’t plan to write a double (or reverse) etheree. After the first two lines, the form took charge. Jennifer, the Open Write host, called it “an in and out etheree,” like a blanket unfolding and fading away.

AI-generated image. Took a few tries to get this. Some of the results were haunting. But so is reality, sometimes.

Still waters

/ Fran Haley / 15 Comments

It’s been a while since I wrote a post, dear Reader and Writer Friends. Life keeps happening. The spiritual journey presses on, across craggy, unforgiving mountains with paths cut too near the edge; down through the valleys steeped in shadows and heavy rainfall; alongside the sea, where sun and salt pull at the wings of the soul longing to be free; and by the shady garden path where one can sometimes find an unoccupied bench to sit awhile, inhaling dewy flower-fragrances. —What is the spiritual journey, if not metaphor?

The beach is always the first summer getaway for my husband and me. Now that the children are grown and married, it’s just us…except for the new puppy, Jesse, now five months old (could this be a reason I haven’t written much of late? Indeed.). And so we headed east with our Jesse in tow.

We needed the break. There are a thousand reasons why. You have the same, yourselves. It so happens that this particular destination is in the quietest community we have ever experienced. New, colorful beach homes with impeccably manicured lawns, rustling palms, rippling birdsong on the ever-present stiff breeze —the ocean, making its nearby presence known. Human voices are almost entirely absent here. We marvel at it. Almost eerie but for the incredible sense of peace and intense sunlight that lasts longer than a summer day ought. Outside with Jesse, soaking up the radiant light, the silence, the rejuventating breeze, the word paradise comes to mind over and over. As does a longing for it to never end.

After dinner one evening my husband and I take a drive. I am the driver now; the loss of his eye and his heart condition make him nervous about driving the new car. This is how it is, now. This is how it will be, as long as our journey continues. On this particular evening, we travel to a beach our children enjoyed when they were small. The road meanders through marsh and lakes. As I am the driver, I can’t look at everything. I catch glimpses of big white birds sailing over the water. Egrets. Elegant. White as snow, poetry come to life. We round a bend and I see a whole colony of them, roosting in a tree by at the waterside.

I could not get a picture…even if I had, it would not do justice to the reality, the breathtaking beauty of that colony of big white birds in the deep, dark green tree by the still waters. Again, the word paradise returns to mind, with a fleeting recollection of being a little child in a bathtub singing a song I made up for myself: Bird of paradise, bird of paradise, you’re so pretty and nice…I don’t know what inspired me. Maybe I’d just learned the term “bird of paradise” and loved it for its lyrical feel.

How quickly time passes. One day a child splashing in a tub singing made-up songs, to—poof!—forty years married, splashing in the sunset chapters of life…still savoring the beautiful, all along the journey.

For it is there, it is there, if we but take time to see.

Thank God for the moments of awe and rest that only He can provide.

AI-generated image of egrets roosting in a tree by the water…does not do justice to the real sight.

*******

With thanks to Karen Eastlund for July’s Spiritual Journey “still waters” theme, and to my fellow SJT writers, who are such good company.