Author: RedCat

RedCat is a lifelong bookworm, that thinks reading, writing poetry and prose, music and dance, makes life worth living. Her writing spans any topic that currently inspires her, be that love, life, environment, mythology or anything else that pops into her head. Originally from the deep woods, this fiery redhead now makes home in Stockholm, Sweden, where you might run into her dancing the night away in one of the city's techno-clubs.

Pain

A child cries heart-wrenchingly
With growing pains
A mother cries silently
Wishing
Heart filled with anguish
To take away and hinder all pain

Through experience knowing
Life contains heartache and pain
It’s even required for growing
All she can do
Is to help her children see it through
Emerge on the other side of fear and pain

In all life’s disappointments
Through all sorrows and pains
Be a supporting presence
Hold them with love and care

As long as there’s breath in her body
Always there

©RedCat

The other night I never got to fall asleep. Around midnight my youngest started to cry heart-wrenchingly because of growing pains. Aside from heating the wheat-heater, there was nothing I could do beside hold him and comfort him. He fell asleep again, fitfully. Waking every other hour to cry. Sometimes during the night, after crying myself because I felt torn in two wanting to do something and knowing I couldn’t, I wrote this poem.

Image credits:

First image: Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash
Second image: Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash
Third image: Photo by __ drz __ on Unsplash

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March Morning Meditation

© RedCat

Morning dawns

Frost covering the lawns

Ten below zero

Radiating fairy glow

Cold and clear

No hint spring is near

Soon there’s a haze

Icy cold air rising

Lifted by the sun’s rays

Winter vaporising

Gentle touch on skin

Warmth starts to seep in

Giving cause

To slow down and pause

Halt the morning commute

Let deep breaths inner landscape transmute

Calms and quiets the angry anxious din

Roaring deep within

Giving peace and clarity of thought

Reducing the turmoil chaos wrought

Showing there’s no need to hesitate

Seek the benefits of taking a short moment to breathe and meditate

Changing the trajectory of morning and day

Allowing what the world throws at you to be handled in a more constructive conductive way

© RedCat

For the first time in ages I felt the drive to meditate. I’m grateful I did. Since it both started off my day in a better way, and sparked my creativity to write a short poem on my morning commute.

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Happy New Year! ❤️

© RedCat

Happy New Year to all of you! ❤️

This year have been different and difficult, not only due to the pandemic.

I found the courage to truly persue my writing dream deciding to take a leap year and go for creative writing classes.
I learnt things about myself I never thought possible. Both that I have more strength and courage than I thought and that apparently I’m neurodiverse. (Still processing that one.)
I got to know, connected with, got close to, new people who have taught me about myself, taught me to appreciate myself, and given me more love and care than my trauma wrought mind thinks I deserve.
I won’t make any new years resolutions but I’ve already wowed to keep writing, keep exploring my inborn strength, keep searching for the right way to pay forward the love and care I’ve been given and keep searching for the most effective way as an ascender to ensure as few children as possible will know the kind of abuse I knew (or any of the other kind available to abusers).

Take care of yourself and through action, not just words, show those you care about your love! ❤️

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Birth Echoes Through Time – 15 December (2020 Re-post)

Birth echoes through all our time
Time shard echoes in our minds
Minds echo with contact cruel or kind
Cruel or kind actions, echo through humankind
Humankind echoes, with what was done before our time
Time to shed the old, to let new life echo all around

©RedCat

Re-post comment:

I’m running late for everything it feels like. But mostly it’s about the writing I have left to do. And the fact that I haven’t prepared the advent calendar as I had thought to do. So here a day late you’ll get the post I have thought to re-post to free my time up and celebrate my oldest turning ten.

Enjoy!

At first I thought I’d do a re-post today, of my first Echo Poem, to give me free birthday time. But my mind keep going round and round in echoes, so I had to write a new one.

Each year in the day leading up to my children’s birthday I have flashbacks of birth both in mind and body. Not something I mention often as it sound so trippy, but both my own mother and others have described similar feelings. And if your open to it, giving birth is one of the most profound birth-death-rebirth experiences, aka trips, a woman can have.

Image credits:

First image: Photo by ©Jonas Norén
Second image: Image Source on Wikimedia Commons
Third image: Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
Forth image: Photo by NASA on Unsplash


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Time Is Running Out – A Haibun, 14 December

As the days shortens and the nights lengthens to midwinter it feels like time is running out. Like soon there be no time left to do anything. The awareness of the coming turning does nothing to alleviate this feeling. Add to that a ton of course work left, a child’s birthday to celebrate and only ten days left to Christmas Eve, and the feeling goes from uneasy to alarming. There really is very little time to get everything left to do done.

Time is running out
This odd year is about to end
Darkness flowing in

© RedCat

Image credits:

First image: Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
Second image: Photo by Gerald Berliner on Unsplash
Third image: Photo by Justin Veenema on Unsplash

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Two Lucia Poems – 13 December (Re-post)

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Re-post comment:

As you might have noticed I’m lagging behind on writing Advent Calendar poems so today you get a double re-post of two poems with the the Swedish tradition around Saint Lucia. Both poems are from 2019.

Saint Lucia

(2019 Re-post)

Walters Art Museum [Public domain]

Fair maiden
come to rekindle the light
Hymn signing
sung to heavens delight
Not a word sung
about your saintly fight
As a woman
with your own goal in sight
Condemned by men
to suffering without respite
To write your praises
my hopes reignite

© REDCAT
Claudia Gründer [CC BY-SA 3.0]

All trough childhood and adolescence I where one of those girls that sang like the angels in Lucia processions. In Sweden it’s all about upcoming midwinter and celebrating the returning light. Also the protestant church don’t have saints so the real symbolism of the story of Saint Lucia of Syracuse has gotten lost along the way.

Also posted to OpenLinkNight #256 at dVerse. Which is why this poem is in the dVerse form of a Quadrille – a poem of 44 words, not counting the titel.

Kolforn (Wikimedia) [CC BY-SA 4.0]

Cold Moon

(2019 Re-post)

Preparations for the last full moon abounds
Where we let the Midwinter darkness fall
Then light return with a fair singing maiden
Her clear voice and it’s adoration turns our eyes upon the star
It’s light compelling us to contemplate
the birth-death-rebirth of the fisher king
Yearly reminder to shed the old and start anew

© REDCAT
Image Source

Where I grew up. A several hundreds year old small, pre-steam industrial-mining-farm-wood-lakes town. Folklore still ran deep even in the 1980s.

“The tradition of Lussevaka – to stay awake through the Lussinatt to guard oneself and the household against evil, has found a modern form through throwing parties until daybreak. ”
– Wikipedia

As a teenager and young adult, no real adult found a problem with us staying out late at discos and parties. As long as some of us (nearly, girls only) also showed up in the early morning hours, clear eyed and sweet voiced to carry lights in our hair or hands singing hymns to Lucia and Light re-born.

So, I grew up with Lucia vigil. It’s a tradition dating back to when Lucia occurred on midwinter, the origin might be somewhere in the pre-christian era, but it is known from the 15th and 16th century. Meaning before Sweden switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1753.

As Midwinter is the opposite point of the year from Midsummer the veil between the worlds where thin, and you kept vigil to keep harmful spirits away and to celebrate and greet the light of a new year in form of a fair singing maiden with light in her hair.

Written for Kerry’s prompt on Real Toads ~ Art FLASH! / 55 in December.
55 words without the title.
Read my first contribution to this double feature prompt here.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
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Late Train Blues – 10 December

The train is late
Very, very late
Making everyone sigh and grumble
Making every stomach rumble
Creeping past endless white fields and forests
Blanketed by a coal black cloudy sky
Begging the question if there even is a destination
Or if we’ll just keep traveling for the rest of life’s duration

© RedCat

Image credits:

https://unsplash.com/@sandramode

https://unsplash.com/@larisabirta

https://unsplash.com/@iartiom

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Susurration of Snow – 9 December

The pitch black midwinter night
Is filled with falling white
Giving off it’s own light

Quieting every city sound
Only the susurration of flakes tumbling around
Before they land sparkling on the ground

In the landscapes muted glow
Keep faith and let the heart know
There are buds of new life hibernating under the snow

©REDCAT
©RedCat

Image credits:

First image: Photo by Jessica Fadel on Unsplash
Second image: Photo by RedCat
Third image: Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash
Forth image: Photo by Viva Zhang on Unsplash

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