Happy Friday, Readers!

The above photo is where I was last Sunday. Ahhh.

I am writing to tell you that this is the inaugural post of an end-of-week series called “Passing Fancies/Quick Picks.” I hope each is worth a good glance or read. It will offer a photo or a poem or a mix of elements–with a whole lot less words than my usual offerings. I do know I tend toward verbose. So these picks will be easier on the eye and, hopefully, mind.

For years I’ve maintained 2 other blogs on WordPress, one for poetry and one for photography. It didn’t make sense. “Tales for Life” is my primary blog. I have posted here twice weekly for about three years. That’s a lot of prose. Yet one more post per week seems doable. I am starting to consider how to improve the blog. This is one tentative step taken.

“Passing Fancies” will be primarily poetry on a range of topics, with occasional mixed- genre but shorter pieces. “Quick Picks” will be just photos of curious, unique or beautiful moments I have discovered with my camera. Each Friday they will take turns, i.e., every other Friday will be poems, with photos the other two Fridays. We’ll see what happens…

I have only published one photo in a lit journal…with a poem, actually, entitled “Whatever Is This” in the online journal The Blue Hour (a fave poem of mine, as it came to me all in a wondrous rush). So I see myself just as a hobbyist–one who loves to share visual inspiration via photography (and very occasionally, drawing or painting). I’ve published more poetry in journals or anthologies than prose over many years. Though I’ve written fiction since childhood (YA stories, too) it wasn’t the big tug as a writer–poetry initially was. Then adult mainstream fiction called me so poem-making took a dive as I became captivated. I also am learning more about nonfiction writing and am enjoying it a great deal.

But poetry can distill life, heighten moments and clarify murkiness in a way that prose does not–at least, for me. It is can be experienced as more spiritually-infused–and is also more immediately personal, though certainly not always about me. I guess I have missed it more than I knew. I might need to start submitting more poems as well as stories.

Let me know what you think. I am glad to keep at it and also see if it gets any “thumbs up.” All that said, I offer today’s poem:

Sea Worthy

It’s the seeking that tells me things;

I remain steadfast, ask for more.

Waves churn around body and mind as if

yielding energy as wisdom.

Skin is transparent under this sun,

heart a small shell emptied

yet the sea tells me more riddles.

Such power is so aged it needs no name.

What means this sea, this wind, this briny life?

It is a mantra, I another creature surrendering.

Salt stuns my lips, words evaporate into light.

(Photos also by Cynthia Guenther Richardson)