This began as a game some bloggers played in 2008, to write about people who'd made an impact, in the same number of words as one's age, every day for a year. I did them less often and went on longer, adding one word each birthday. I stopped in 2016 and incorporated them into my main poetry blog. In 2019 I resumed the project and gave it its own blog again, with a new name, where it may unfold at its own (slow, intermittent, lapsing and resuming) pace. I've labelled these verse portraits, but they're more like quick sketches: mere glimpses, impressions....


Sunday, 19 October 2008

My Extra-Terrestrial Friend

Did you find a physicist?
Not many scientists here
do telepathy!

Our meditation group
reached out,
found you orbiting;
couldn’t begin to grasp
what you had to impart.

No ‘little green man’,
your projected image
was long, columnar,
non-humanoid …
and yes, green: bright
as if lit from within.

I guess you went home
when your two years were up.

You were friendly and fun.
I liked you.



[Poem #58]

Ursula Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea
was my first fantasy novel
(Alice more classic than genre;
and, not raised on Narnia,
that still unread).
Ursula, it was you
who gave me this way
of entering dream and dimensions:
writing with grace and wit,
imparting the ways of magick,
moral dilemmas, growth.
I was very young,
though not so young as your hero.
He — you — taught me
how to develop character.



[Poem #57]

Friday, 10 October 2008

Karuna Mayi

At Healers’ Day
I cleared your past life:
Hermann, tortured for witchcraft;
healer then too (herbs, alchemy)
I your acolyte.
This life, your Reiki Master.

                ******

Millennium meditation
you stood: angel,
arms outspread
holding the energy.

              ******

The last time I ever saw you
I wanted to say, ‘Love you forever.’
The words rose in me
but seemed too final, so I said,
‘I’ll see you again.’
I expect so.



[Poem #56]