Bibliomancy

Bibliomancy is to use a book to make a prediction just by holding a question in your mind and opening the book at random and seeing what turns up. In our case we used a dictionary, opening it three times to find three words. We then used these as prompts for a poem or a short story. Writers were challenged to add an element of prediction to what they wrote. Here's a couple of pieces from what turned out to be a very enjoyable session!

THE STYLE OF THE HEART

Nestled within our hearts, lays the style of the mind; embedded within darkness of self beliefs that make us blind.

There is a light that shines, a diffract, cutting away the dark. Revealing ourselves from within, of who we were; to reveal to us who we can become.

The diffract embedded with the style of the soul and all the possibilities that lay before, in a glittering blaze of hope. 

Shattering the darkness of past days revealing in the hour of our need, what we ourselves require to see.

To reach beyond all that we held in belief that made us blind. Opening our eyes to the truth we hold and always did, setting us free.

- S. B. P. Davis

THREE WORDS ... SINCE 1975

Flood Slip

Inexperience was Master

the dull, distant rumble beneath

             the constant dropping of rain

Vibration, house-shaking, earth-sliding

            evoking queasy-danger

not quaking, not rolling, unlifted-unlowered

unlike a rolling earthquake through banked grass

Acres of retrospection don’t do justice to memory

A story told and retold doesn’t live the fear, the doubt

the anxiety driving thought to weird action

Events infrequent, rarefy and scatter emotions tied to aloneness

Again with the rain, the flood, the slip

not rare now are fear, doubt, experience

Again?

- Kate Jenkins