August’s writing prompt was Drought. Here we showcase all the responses that were submitted.
Drought prompt: Land barren and dehydrated. What could grow in this stifling environment which yearns for rain?
Chapel Beneath Pontsticill Reservoir
Drought risen.
Stone arch damp
green weed clung
sunlight struck.
Once congregations
passed through
praying to their god
to be saved.
Sunken.
Home to pike
and wild brown trout
beneath leaden water.
Bibles pew stacked
sodden fish fodder
awaiting redemption
from murky depths.
Forgotten.
Until drought
brought this year’s
low tide.
by Mike Everley (mj_everley Insta)
Teach Me a Rain Dance
The unfamiliar sound of droplets plays music on the skylight. I rush downstairs to the open patio door, straining to see barely visible water falling through the air. Am I hallucinating? Is that really the rumbling sound of distant thunder?
It’s been an exceptionally dry summer. The notoriously green Normandy landscape has taken on parched ochre shades usually associated with southerly departments. A neighbouring roadside field bears black scorch marks from a recent wildfire successfully tackled by the local brigade, unaccustomed to such phenomena. Elsewhere, crops have failed from thirst. Potatoes are small and in scarce supply. Our vegetable plot lays barren and shrivelled.
By day, we’ve hidden in the relative cool of our home, windows firmly closed and south-facing shutters lowered. Claustrophobic gloom inducing lethargy. Unable to stave off pessimism, we have little appetite. When 6pm chimes, we venture outside to sit on chairs in a tree’s shade. A faint breeze usually arrives with the changing tide. We sip cool drinks and reconnect with the living world.
By night, we toss and turn in stifling still air, throwing off covers we’re bitten by intruding insects. We rise early morning, unrested, bleary, irritable, throwing doors and windows open to reduce the temperature inside a few precious degrees. A race against the clock until another imprisonment.
I step outside, feeling a new freshness to the air, smelling rain, and when the first tiny speck tickles my bare arm, I grin madly and pray for it to continue. Small droplets become larger and increasingly frequent. This is what I heard a few moments ago. I turn my face upwards, arms spread wide, palms upturned, mouth open to drink in the fresh liquid, tasting life and hope. I’d do a rain dance if I only knew how.
by Jane Jackson
Drought
cracks everywhere
life drained
left dust dry
no repair
on the horizon
burning sun
a blow torch
so fierce
throats gasp
despair commonplace
no dam
set to burst
to save
with epsom rain
parched lungs heave
where are the bellows?
by Adele Robins (@your_words_worth Insta)
Lost
A time capsule sleeps beneath the earth,
where I left the innocence I once carried,
childish laughter,
light as a summer breeze.
I laid it down in the dark,
a pile of stories never meant to be told,
sealed tight against time.
I whispered of my old pale blue swing,
where a young girl slept through noon,
among daydreams and wounds,
caught in its rhythm.
But now the capsule rests,
somewhere in the wasteland,
humbled by the earth itself,
devoured by the hush,
wondering where the young girl has gone.
A flower takes root in the crack of its silent fate,
so even should time stand still,
it need not be alone in the endlessness.
by Bonniela (@bukit.kesemek Insta)
Epilogue
If you want to strip bare carrion,
ask this woman if she wants children.
When I was a little child,
all was promise, I was wild!
“Weaker” sex with strong ideals,
tall in tall grass, ran through fields;
dreamt of futures green and lush
and babies babbling, summer’s dream!
Now those dreams are dried and hushed,
the Earth’s turned salt with grief unseen;
Adam says my apple’s rotten;
harvest parched regrets this Autumn:
my works, ye Mighty, shall be forgotten!
So, after me, who’ll dream their faces?
Teach them how to tie shoe laces?
Who tucks in bed what could have been
when I am dead and gone?
If you’ve questions, ask just one:
is grief this story’s ending told?
Having bared my fears, my soul,
birdsong must to silence fall;
mulch the ground with these pulped poems,
and Robin shall watch for worms.
by Robin May Platt
Landscapes Whisper
When a person doesn’t want to live anymore, then the landscapes take over.
Ezreen lay on the ground, her limbs loose, spread out, and her eyes perfectly shut. Her caramel hair lit up under the eventide glow. She rested so still that the surrounding landscapes towered over her and whispered.
‘Is it an offering? To us?’ The coarse Mediterranean shrubland wheezed.
‘It’s merely a woman.’ The nearby singular rock resonated disapprovingly.
‘Oh, to lodge my tongue in between the human crevices.’ The sea gurgled as it drew frothily closer to have a look.
‘Some wait, a form, again.’ The sky leered at the gathered landscapes. Soughing, it circled down towards her.
Tiny ants in a long queue had started to make their way onto her dormant terrain, mounting her thumb. Her sleeping rose and fell softly.
Shrubland
Ezreen drank gallons of water, going through her Airbnb’s water supplies as the dryness itched all over inside. Her travelling buddies raised their brows when they spotted her embalmed in face masks from head to toe, by the refrigerator, glugging the milk carton. They
couldn’t purely blame her as the Mediterranean had been deceptively hot and dry this summer.
Because the land always watches, Ez had lost her appetite for sleep. Instead, her curious eyes rested on the cushion of dark circles, barely blinking as they surveyed for any movement. What is a land but an open stage for interesting occurrences? Her bottomless hunger for drama had her leaning against the kitchen slab, watching the other cohabitants teetering on an uncomfortable conversation about who misplaced their laundry, munching on her crackers. When their tiff diffused rather amicably, Ez tutted and left the show dissatisfied.
“You don’t understand, this land has seen many ordeals and feats, it’s all too bare now,” impassioned, Ez thrusted her coiling hiking staff into the flaking ground.
Her friends let her be since this trip was for her, and so, they nodded along breathlessly, avoiding getting their shins scratched by the thorny shrubs.
Often, she would see the gathered pilgrims doing their routine of similar ritual prayers and prostrating to the sacred land. She waited for the gratification, but Land-in-Ez didn’t feel holy inside. She felt almost nothing.
But when it was late in the evening, Ez stood across the street and witnessed a passing local musician stop by to play his lute for a group of young tourists who were already giggling and swirling around. More swayers joined from the nearby restaurant, balancing their frothing beers to dance in an empty, dimly lit cobble-street.
Land-in-Ez’s eyes shone, exhaling in gratitude to the lively visitors who brought along momentum to the vacant spaces. A cool breeze had picked up.
With another deep inhale, she then began to watch the lay of the land within, turning her awareness inward.
Rock
Everything moved too fast whilst Ez sat like a rock. Her legs spread out, back too straight and stiff, she was squaring the space in the tram. Passengers, for unknown reasons, felt too comfortable to nod off on her shoulder, eventually.
She hadn’t noticed when she was slamming into the people striding along the crosswalk, or when she let go of the exit door on the foreheads of the fellow shoppers following behind. She had to be pulled aside by her mates to avoid any further social improprieties.
Ez’s zoning out was interrupted when the aged man sitting opposite to her clicked his fingers, partially turned around, “Eh, what is an obstacle in a path? Four letters.”
His wife, sitting behind him, back-to-back, considered the crossword hint.
She non-committedly guessed, “A lump? A mound? No, that’s five letters…”
“A rock.”
“Too literal,” the wife shook her head.
“Too literal.” The man echoes his agreement.
The wife’s thoughtful voice still swam in postulations, ‘Obstacle? All problems can be dissolved into solutions. All lumps can be broken down. At best, they could’ve said, ‘A landmass, in the process of, of weathering.’’
“You’re right, my love.” The man happily wrapped up his crossword, tucking it in. Looking up, he smiled at Rock-in-Ez.
Ez, unsmiling, was still chewing on the new definitions for her state of being. She didn’t want to be an obstacle, nor an eternally bound mass of material. So that’s what Ez decided to be, an entity in process. There was a process happening inside of her, a directed momentum, even if it was that of disintegration.
Relative stillness had its own perks. Ez could out-observe anyone. Instead of just witnessing the high traffic of the undercurrents in her travelling troupe’s group dynamics as they sat out under the moonlight, she turned her attention towards the non-human.
“Can you see that gibbous moon snailing, arching through the sky? I can.”
Her pals paused their howling and chugging their beers as they sat around the campfire, to look at Ez.
Sea
The frozen Rock melted into a sentimental summer sea. Being the Sea meant that once Ez started laughing at an innocuous joke, it kept on tiding periodically, making it funnier on each resurfacing. And Ez laughed and laughed, shakily, arching forward as she held her belly, until briny hiccups punctuated it violently.
Ez began accessing all the vaults of compassion within her. And the sea began seeping in everywhere, giving way to the tsunami of feelings. For days, Ez threw up brine water, only to interlude between her feverish sobs. Her friend held back her hair from the spilling mess. When Ez felt better, the friend took her out for a stroll.
Sea-in-Ez gazed at the vast Prussian blue ocean as they sat perched on the cliff in bright daylight.
Her daffodil friend sitting beside Ez, smiled at her, “You look lovely in this light, you’re practically shimmering.”
She tucked Ez’s loose curl behind her ear. Checking hesitatingly with her, “Have you…decided?”
Ez remained silent, looking straight ahead. But the Sea inside of her rushed loudly, frothily, filling up all her crevices. What decision? How important could it be? Like life or death? And even if it was death, was it that serious?
‘When you want to die, it’s a part inside of you that wants to end. And it’s imperative that you do.’ The Sea guided Ez.
Ez finally asked, ‘What part is that?’
Will this conundrum visit her in rhythms, eternally? Sea-in-Ez wondered.
Sky
When the waters drained, vacuousness offered all the space within Ez to the sky.
All that existed was immediately connected and made apparent at the same time. All points of view, all perspectives gathered within Ez’s body. A bit crowded, but what a privilege and how utterly cool. But, why were her feet so far away from her head? Ez’s head felt like a balloon attached to an immeasurably long thread. She stumbled forward with the vertigo scare. As she gathered herself and felt life back in her legs, she fell into the habit of stomping the ground with her right foot to remind herself that she was still indeed on solid
ground.
Sky-in-Ez meant that most of the time she thought about nothing in specific, had no particular to-dos for the day and was pretty easy to get along with for the rest of the trip. A slight intoxication had started to take over Ez’s inside, and she suspected that she was
expanding and expanding. Sticking her entire torso out of their moving car’s window, she couldn’t be pulled in when the breeze was just so right. Her eyes shut, the wind was howling, and her hair whirled everywhere, but the expanse outside and inside of her was the same.
To wrap up their travels, the troupe went to a popular taverna in the nearby small town. While her friends discussed their trip’s memorable moments, Ez soared high above the rustic wooden table laden with platters of coastal food and drinks. Her perspective went
farther up, rising over the terracotta roof tiles, and she saw the town with its orbs of street lights. She nodded serenely, smiling through the conversations, eyes barely open.
She got up to use the toilet when she felt a sudden weight attached to her waist. An older man had cut through the crowd upon recognising her, only to throw and wrap himself around her waist. He immediately broke into inconsolable sobs that kept on mounting into hysterical crying. His face buried in his arms, Ez noticed his greying hair by the temples. He wailed in sorrow as if he and Ez shared a past, or impending, tragic experience. He slid down her legs, clasping helplessly still. There was no familiarity in Sky-in-Ez’s expressions. She looked down at him, detached, as if she were at a great exospheric distance. She didn’t feel like breaking her tranquil state of consciousness to let him know that whatever the devastation was, she did not care; she was completely free from it. But the whimpering man had shrivelled in agony and lay pooled by her feet, tethering her to the ground.
Looking at the utter condition of this being, a mist of pity and sadness began dampening Sky-in-Ez’s insides. A moment later, she naturally crouched down and hugged the curled man. On the embrace, his cries were let out louder, a relief in the joint acknowledgement of their sorrow.
Later, Ez repicked her prior query that was drifting within, ‘The part that feels dense, sinking and withering, needs to be let go.’
The Sky shrugged. It didn’t care about her doubts or revelations, as it was composed of it all. It had no process to fall in line with, nothing else to do. It simply was.
Rainbow
Another time, Ez awakened, sitting up on the low dewy hillside. A flash of multicoloured light blinded her. She tried to shield her eyes from the source of the kaleidoscopic dancing lights of blue, yellow, green, and orange, but she couldn’t figure out the exit from scintillation. She looked up, barely squinting, and realised that she was really sitting under the arcing beams of the light falling on her. Her insides began tingling, cells slowly popping with ecstasy. She
could feel the individual colours and their effects within her as she sat under the rays. Indigo registered a thorough awareness within her, blue gave her a cooling dizziness, green saw her in warm expansion, yellow energised her into the present moment, and red urged her into greater movement.
She stood up with a start, passing through the prism. Rubbing her eyes, she adjusted her perspective of the outside world as she walked along.
by Ashmeen Bains