Showing posts with label karyn huntting peters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label karyn huntting peters. Show all posts

Sunday, November 05, 2006

desert twilight

by Karyn Huntting Peters





desert twilight
earth releases its heat—
pink flower opens


Saturday, November 04, 2006

two

by Karyn Huntting Peters



Painted at age 18. Acrylic on canvas.



Friday, November 03, 2006

prana flow

by Karyn Huntting Peters


silent harmonies
prana crescendos flowing—
eternal circle


day’s mask

by Karyn Huntting Peters



night again.
the common and staid mask of day
slips off my face to rest beside me as
i stare into the nothingness of my tears.

it is only here, beneath the tiny, thin layer
of film that floats on the waters of my mind,
that the aching soul resides in silent anguish.

it holds its thespian face up, ever-stoic, hand
steady even as it is lanced by the piercing
bite of fine steel. encore! encore!

there is a chill in the air, and i am
cold as the curtain falls.




castaneda

by Karyn Huntting Peters

castaneda spoke once though a surrogate
revelation. it was written. the napkin upon which
it was inscribed in blue ballpoint was carefully lain
to rest in the corner of my lost place,
just where I cannot recall.

but napkins don’t hold up well in the rain,
especially when curious would-be wisemen pluck
at them, trying to decipher their treasures in
haste, lest the rain’s tears cry all their blues
away before dawn’s first cameo.




lying stars

by Karyn Huntting Peters

from this vantage point,
in my thoughts alone i venture out,
walking silently along the parapet wall,
running my hand along its wet roughness
in the beginning twilight.

beyond, lights glow and flicker in reds and blues,
and music rises and climbs to meet me on the hillside,
a strained, haunting version of its harmonious city self.

nothing passes the barrier of this aging stone wall
that is not but a shell of itself, a copy of life,
a haunting of time gone by though still in view,
as a long-dead star shining hollow in the night.

as twilight ebbs and dies,
i venture now from my thoughts
and still in them rise, self joining my contemplations
on the thief of time, and on this barrier stay as stone
as lying stars appear in time in black skies.

lying as staid stars, i stay and steal time
over that which has stolen so much from me.




baroque

by Karyn Huntting Peters




baroque men once
sat
composing in spring.
baroque trees now
stand
decomposing in fall.


thief clouds

by Karyn Huntting Peters





distant clouds
steal the mountain’s peak—
petals float to the ground


misanthropes

by Karyn Huntting Peters

oh, to gather these misanthropic
souls all, sticky with hearts of tar,
to tear them from us and cleave them
to one another, unseen hands fashioning them
into a concrete pedestal in the barren steppe!

oh, to lighten humanity’s load by even
one shade of blackness.


scent

by Karyn Huntting Peters




open blades of grass
inhale the changeless seasons—
remember love’s scent

circle of time

by Karyn Huntting Peters



we move forward in time, propelled, a
force from behind, rush of water, wind, flying free
until we slow, slow, and are borne back into the current
once again,
back until our arms tire and the tears rise
once again,
an endless loop of time, where
forward and backward,
yesterday and tomorrow
are all endless illusions of time circling
around and around and around again,
caught in the grooves of a broken record playing
over and over and over again
on the dusty phonograph of
deep, still waters



Thursday, November 02, 2006

child's cat


by Karyn Huntting Peters

Sketched at age 12 using #2 pencil.

the willow

by Karyn Huntting Peters



the willow weeps today,
head bowed in black,
bereaved silhouette on the
horizon.

the dying sun
spills its crimson blood in
adieu.



Sonnet I: Know Thyself

poetry by Nathan Hays
graphics by Karyn Huntting Peters



In all the world are strewn the litter of burning mind,
Scraps of journals torn in desperate hope to find,
A glimpse of Hermes' tablet, the jigsaw's missing piece,
The Word was lost so long ago, no one rests in peace.

"I found it!" proclaims the prophet who waves a patchwork page,
"It lives!" declares the scientist leashed to monster's rage,
"Eureka!" cries the thinker, his logic a world entire,
"My God," assures the pious who forsakes his true desire.

Each in turn will falter if ever they pause to see,
No key they have, no passport, no chalice to set them free,
For once they cage the candle, the light will fade away,
Their charred remains will fill the wasteland that will stay.

Follow not the guides whose flocks are led astray,
Only from within you will be found the truest way.






Sonnet II: The Playwright

by Karyn Huntting Peters



Midnight's velvet curtain obscures the ancient stage
Avon's murky waters still lay in silent wait
Slowly actors gather for their long-awaited wage
Stratford's dusty pages their hollow yearnings sate

The moon's orb rises higher, commands the star-crossed sky
Lumens flooding Avon, its secrets hidden still
The curtain slowly lifting, the stage's hemlock dry
Players take their places, the playwright grasps his quill

The pulsing night's blood quickens, the scenes to pages flow
Breezes coyly shifting, plays ending far from sewn
What tragedy lay waiting, no earthly spirits know
Stage borne into reality, its martyrs still unknown

The audience is fading, far stars now growing bright
And we are now the playwright, the ink our mystic night




Sonnet III: The Muse

by Karyn Huntting Peters



Return to me o muse in dreams redeem thy course
By sleep the dust of stars doth carry thy embrace.
In raging tears of angst doth thou with no remorse
Full baptize hand of mine and bathe my pen in grace.

Thine eyes ensconce long-darkened tomb in golden light,
Illumineth thy sweet advance my most demure.
Disquietude thou dissipate by veil of night,
Thy softly-whispered words my mortal fears abjure.

And offer thou apothecary’s potion nigh
That i should drink with certain hand and toast to thee.
To winged flight ascend thy poesy or die,
In death as life to lie beneath the judas tree.

From dusty headstones hearts are lifted from their strife,
From ashes rise unbound to soul’s immortal life.






Aurora Borealis

by Nathan Hays and Karyn Huntting Peters
graphics by Karyn Huntting Peters



A magnetic shudder precedes your long-awaited arrival. You are all around me, ethereal aurora borealis, hues shimmering violet, green, blue, white. Entrance your nascent victim, aurora. Sway enticingly, cascading down like waterfalls from the right hand of Zeus. Lance Arthurian swords of ancient waters through the heart of the blood-red earth. Fall from the skies like fire into the yearning hands of Prometheus. Burn through the writhing bodies of the eternal stigmata-marked. Siphon from earth's molten core its darkest pain to quiet the wandering of your ghostly lights above. Hear the unspoken whispers of dervish souls escaping into the night air, and quill their rapturous embraces and anguished tears on eternal palimpsests with night sky's blackest ink.

- Karyn


Far from burning sands and steaming jungle is an arctic silence screaming in brilliant hues. While the wide world wipes dusty grime from its salty brow, Merlin's fire lances through the icy forms frozen in the endless twilight. Deep into the earth the unearthly power streams. The dynamo throbs in rhythm with the pulsing rain. Sol's secret wind replenishes the occult flame.

- Nate


Infused anew with the mystical fire, overflowing now with white hot embers, the earth dances slowly across its starlit ballroom, slain through by the unearthly dynamo, hypnotized by Merlin's sword of light. Prometheus slowly closes his now-sated hands and draws them close to his breast. It is done.

The dervishes whirl and whisper in the ether, somewhere between the molten core of earth and the violet flame of the aurora. There is electricity in the air and the occasional sound of scratching quills. The aurora borealis has never burned this brightly, this deeply.

- Karyn


How mundane seem the mechanics of graphite and fiber, ink and vellum, oil and canvas. Carbon infiltrates the matrix with inextricable randomness. Turbid solvents flow into tiny cracks only to evaporate to the winds leaving their flotsam residues. Ordered colors are smeared together with entropic fineness. As might a meteor smash perfect quartz into a billion fragments or a star radiate its fusions across the spectrum.

And yet, coursing through these dying movements is fire! Ripping through the dust is a searing wind that leaves mere whorls and traces, but will entrance the djinns to come. In vapid grit lay forms meaningless to the universe, yet fuel the divine flames that dance upon it.

Grasp the clays, for they are the veil and the portal that lay between us.

- Nate


Promethean promise unbroken, gift delivered, the fires of the kiln are stoked. Arctic ices begin to melt, mirroring aurora's ancient dance. The scalding breath of Olympian spectators rouses the sleeping spirits. Magmous caverns, awakened by the scent of warm gases, await their metamorphosis.

The hushed voices of the ether grow louder. The djinn are stirring in adagio, crossing over from their eternal dream of auroras and waterfalls and verdant glades.

The sky pulses with life. The earth seethes in the heat of the growing pyre. The mythical bird marks another half millennium gone as he circles the dancing flames. The clays will soon be cast.

Hands of the Moirae descend in a pas de deux, but the veil will not yet be lifted. Whispers from the zephyr: porta eterna.

- Karyn


While vast preponderate clouds of frenetic atoms coalesce in galactic proportions, the silent mirror begins to stir. Eerie colors like oil films on an unseen ether swirl and knot. Soon globules of Promethean fire condense and separate. Into the lifeless clay the light presses like singularities in dimensions beyond ken. Olympian hands seal each in geodes of hardening slime. Globs of oozing mud are molded around them.

As the heat of the great furnace penetrates into the argillaceous mass, threads of the divine flame grow from within in fractal venation. Capillary fineness continues to bifurcate until the dimensions entwine on Planck's scale and the melding is complete. Soul mirrors matter in a Yin Yang of intimacy.

Infinite mind veiled in portals of clay. The breach is open though few see it or pass.

- Nate