A recent Daily Create was called “Silk Weaving,” and it said, “Ever had the urge to weave some silk? You’re in luck. Design your own weave here.” The link (go ahead, try it!) takes you to an interactive online app that allows you, the user, to move your mouse against a dark background to create brightly colored filaments of silk.

This is the one I created, which I called, “I Sing the Body Electric” after Walt Whitman’s famous line.

Somehow the image and the action of the falling silk strands entered the back door of my imagination, tossing lines of poetry at me as I drove home from work last night.

This morning, I started working out what at first I imagined as a sonnet, and it still has some of that loose structure and rhyme and variable pentameter, but I added a couple more couplets at Peter’s suggestion.

Silk

Tonight, fireworks explode

against the dark sky raining fiery

strands of silk zenith to horizon,

then Dark Spider darts across the road

 

to gather up those threads of memory

now in her possession.

 

It is She who shuttles back and forth

and weaves the worlds together;

only now I dare to cross

her fragile swaying web of silk and feathers.

 

I climb shining veins of the living tree

and lift my arms, shaking like a shaman

in a trance, my faint shout of, “Me!”

heard only by my father, spirit, always human.

 

Beloved dead flame like shooting stars

in solar wind that ceaseless pours

these brilliant silks streaming by;

my wild branches catch them as they fly.

You can listen to me reading “Silk” by clicking on the bright orange arrow below:

:
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