morning libation
honey embalms the moment
for waking dreamers
caught in eternal amber
time yet drinks the wine of life

The sun rises over sea and field, winter and summer, seen and unseen behind the veil of clouds, turning all it touches to gold. I think of Midas, the king whose desire for riches caused him to kill the thing he loved most with his golden gift. When they found this tomb, there were traces of honey-wine in his feasting cups… even his drink was made of gold, but his legendary power could neither give life nor ward him from death.

The sun too can bring bounty or destruction, but here it brings only life and light. I drink in the morning, tasting sunlight and dew on my lips. That moment outside of time, poised between day and night, I live forever.

For Colleen’s poetry challenge

Are you excited to see who won? You should be. It was CRAZY hard to determine the best story out of so many amazing entries.

These were GOOD stories, gang.

Really good.

And the fact is, on a different day or in a different contest, ANY of these finalists stories could have taken the top slot.

I know you wanna get right to who won, and some of you are gonna scroll down to peek (I would), so I’ll go ahead and say the stuff that ought to be said – for when you scroll back up.

your humble (and very tired) host

How difficult is it to look at tons of stories and figure out which one is THE BEST?

I spent hours and hours looking over the stories, seeing which one stuck out from the crowd, which one took the #1 spot – until…

When summer comes and we are all supposed to be otherwise occupied with sun, sand, sea and yet more sun, it appears that the WordPress gremlins take advantage of our absence to play. Being British, you can take ‘sun’ and ‘more sun’ out of that equation, which is probably why I have been noticing the odd little tweaks, trials and anomalies around here lately. It is either WordPress playing again or my blog has developed a vicious streak of its own.

As I am certain that after all the complaints about ‘improvements’ the Happiness Engineers would never sneak something appalling up on us behind our backs again, I can only conclude that the blog has some sort of grudge and is extracting a mean and sneaky revenge.

It started by swallowing a horde of followers. They just disappeared. Not, I hasten to add, because my content had so appalled…

Summer invasion
Bounty inviting beauty
Irresistable

Perfect treasure trove
Seekers of the golden gift
Bring home the harvest

The art of being happy
lies in the power of
extracting happiness
from common things.

~ Henry Ward Beecher ~
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