Life's Jumbles

By Elizabeth S. Buchanan

About the Book
Life’s Jumbles is a poet’s response to life around her, focusing on aspects of daily activities, family, travel, emotions, nature, and life’s diversities. The book is based on the unique experiences of the poet, who hopes the reader will perhaps ponder new perspectives when viewing a situation, or the reader may say,
“That’s my exact sentiment too!”

About the Author
For Elizabeth S. Buchanan, when life presents challenges, she delves into them with enthusiasm and excitement. She currently lives on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean because her only daughter married a Frenchman and she is a happy grandmother of three young children. Buchanan’s hobbies include a wide range of activities from running, club-car racing, live theater, and playing extras in films in her younger days. In the retirement stage of her life, Buchanan looks to such activities as quilting, reading, and writing. Throughout her life, she has enjoyed membership in various organizations: Corvette Club of NC, Alumni associations of Winthrop University, University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, George Mason University and in the local protestant church wherever she happens to reside. As an educator for more than forty-seven years, she has expanded her horizons through many rich and extensive life experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Apr 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887299594

Book preview

About the Author

Throughout her life, Elizabeth Buchanan has been enchanted with words and languages. This fascination began as a teenager, subsequent to a family vacation into the French-speaking area of Canada, along the St. Lawrence River. She achieved university degrees in history, then French, later in linguistics, and finally, in administration and supervision. Her studies and working career in education were interspersed with many personal travels, including assignments through the auspices of three Fulbright Exchange Programs. Along the way, she became involved with writing poetry to express her reactions and emotions to the novel and unusual encounters in her travels and the people she met in daily life. Strong, internal reflection triggered her poetic muse. Her poetry found spontaneous expression in such life activities as travel, family gatherings, mountain hiking, visiting historic sites, or something as simple as coming upon an ant hill. Now, in the autumn of her life, she hopes to share common feelings, new perspectives, or different versions of approaching life’s events through her verses.

Elizabeth S. Buchanan

September 1, 2022

Travel I

The Traveler

Taxi to the airport;

Taxi down the tarmac.

Train stations, bus stations

And rest stations.

Hurrying and hustling,

Pausing and pawing…

Pushing and shoving

While coming and going

In constant motion.

The excitement of the exotic

Has exhausted his sensorium.

Finally, the weary traveler is

Too hard pressed to press on.

The bright lights of night’s eyes

Might delight the spent soul,

But the city sounds sound far away

While he succumbs to sweet, soothing sleep.

He dreams dreams of the next day’s dawning…

That fantastic fiction which refills the fount

And revives the intrepid traveler

For yet another, alluring adventure.

Lacoste

Street lights

Projecting their glow…

Dust ever blowing…

A hardy plant

Peeping out between

Stacks of stones…

Smells of yeast bread

Wafting upward…

With foggy morns

Crouching in the valley.

Banking up the hillside

Facing Mont Ventoux

Quaint stone houses

Built by the Romans

…Or beyond

Winding and twisting

The narrow, little streets

Mount onward toward the crest.

Reaching the rounded top

Sprawling out in disarray

Piles of debris

And heaps of stones

Mark an ancient residence.

No roof,

Incomplete

Solitary

Standing against the Mistral.

No formal approach

Unshaded by trees

Overgrown by tares

Windowless

And defenseless

The shell of a chateau

Once inhabited by

The Marquis de Sade

Remnants of a time

Not yet forgotten.

The ghost of De Sade

Evoking an inward shudder

The blush of imagined acts

With a reputation of sex and pain

Rapacious

Rara avis

Scintillating but short lived

In this now jagged image

Silhouetted against

The clear, dark sky.

Stark and haunting

Beckoning, but repelling

The full moon casting

Eerie shadows

Washing the walls

With paler shades of

Limestone gray.

Doors chained shut

Against today’s invaders.

No escape from the hell within

The spirit of De Sade

Watches in vain what

Villagers ignore, while

Tourists outwardly gape

With insatiable curiosity.

Machu Picchu

Scaling the summit of the mountain

One labored step; another slower yet!

Inhaling…thin…clean air

Exhaling…

Sin ti, Inti, God of the sun,

At Machu Picchu

How can this be!

What sacred hands

Fashioned these boulders!

Fitting stone against stone

Designing a sacred city!

Hidden on a pinnacle

More than a millennium

Observe… Now

Los ojos, hardy eyes of the world

Scan the sacrosanct grounds

To sneer or wonder

Las Almas, souls of former inhabitants

Gaze back from the