Purple bougainvillea
For this week’s Lens Artists Challenge, we are to show photos with one predominanat color
Colors! for LAC
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Snake of Light for W3 Prompt
Snake of light,
back and forth,
one bright flash
carves the dark night,
Fire before rain
Give Me Blue for dVerse Poets
Give Me Blue
If it is a blue with no sadness in it:
the blue of the sky above Colima Volcano
with no other clouds in it except one puff
of earth’s hot breath becoming visible
in the cool morning air.
If it is a blue
with no middle ground of safety,
nothing that makes it ordinary.
No hue of boredom
or gray cast of age.
No tint of ever ending––
just pure blue
holding its mood in,
letting you feel however you want to feel.
The blue of glass that reflects the sky.
Iris blue and periwinkle.
Cerulean and cobalt.
If it is a blue with not a smudge of green in it,
or yellow or white or black.
Blue-blue like my tue love’s eyes
and like the color that a blueberry Popsicle
should be––its blue dusted by nature
as though frosted, even in the heat of summer.
Like blue caught in icicles.
The color of a jellyfish
or Noxzema jar.
Bluebottle fly, tenacious,
only its color not annoying.
Blue as a shiver. Blue as blood. Blue as Hawaii.
Not the blue of a heart before forgetting.
Not that blue with a lot of
dullness soaked into it.
But if you have Blue as in Australia.
Blue as in a first place ribbon.
Sky blue,
true blue,
never blue.
Blue that if it’s ever had one gram of sadness in it,
doesn’t show it.`
If you have that blue,
and you want to give it to me,
then, sure.
Give me blue.
for dVerse Poets, the prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem about one of the given Chagall paintings.
In The Doghouse, for Sure!!! For dVerse Poets
What happens when you finally get a full 8 hours of sleep after months of 2 or 3 hours a night (if you are lucky––0 to 1 if you aren’t?) The prescription your doctor gave you says it is a none-steroidal, none-addictive mild anxiety med that may make you sleepy. I got it half right. I got a full night’s sleep, but unfortunately carried my anxiety along with me into what felt like a full-night’s dream. The further irony is that it has been years since I’ve been able to remember my dreams. (And, you are doggone right. This is waaaaay more than 44 words. You can’t get it all right!!!) And I swear, every word I have written is the truth. I was about to answer the dVerse prompt last night but I absolutely could not get on the Internet and so gave up to fall into the sleep that produced this story which after years of no dream memory and at least three months of almost no sleep, I hope you give me the poetic license to tell. Not poetry, not 44 words, but the gospel truth. Now, I guess I really am in the doghouse?
Dogged Dreams
It is 5:58 in the morning and I was just awakened by my barking dogs…all three of them. There is a good side to the story as I was awakened from a dream in which absolutely everything went wrong. In the dream, after I had waited for two hours for an interviewer to show up, the man who was to introduce me actually gave such a long intro that he ended up essentially giving all of the informmation I was going to reveal in the interview, and even then, the interviewer did not show up. His assistant did, however, to retrieve equipment that was actually equipment that belonged to me, and no matter what I said, he refused to believe me and took it anyway, saying if I wanted to bring it up with his company later, I could.
Then a friend came by saying she was going to the liquor store to buy Scotch and did I want her to get me some? Under no circumstances, I said, I badly needed a drink, but I hated Scotch. Could she get me a bottle of gin? “Done,” she said, then showed up proudly as I began my third hour of waiting for the interviewer (who never did show.) “Here you go,” she said, presenting me with a huge bottle that included a wooden stand that proudly announced its name: “Scotch!” I had just pointed out her error to see her march away, furious, sure that I’d ordered the damn Scotch, and was about to follow her off the interview site after telling them they were the most poorly organized outfit I’d ever seen and that I was announcing the name of the person who took my equipment to the owner of the company, who happened to be my uncle(a lie)––when the dogs began to bark, thus saving me from an additional minute more of torment.
The dVerse Poets prompt was: Write about the dog days – of summer, of war. The dog-eared pages of your favorite novel. Tell us about a time you were sick as a dog, or give us a little hair of the dog. Make it rain cats and dogs. Put your poem through a downward-facing dog yoga pose, or let it run with the dogs. Let sleeping dogs lie, or tell the truth about this dog-eat-dog world – or anything else you doggone please. Just be sure your poem is exactly 44 words long, including some form of the word dog – or you’ll be in the doghouse.
Image made with help of AI
“Symmetry” for the Cosmic Photo Challenge
For the Cosmic Photo Challenge, the prompt is “symmetry.”
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #125.” Today’s number is 247.
Closed Gate
Did you happen to see who did this, Morrie?
Click on photos to enlarge
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #125.” Today’s number is 247. To play along, go to your photos file folder and type the number 247 into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title. This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below.
How Art Finds You
On December 7, I discovered this gorgeous bloom hidden behind the palm fronds and giant philodendron leaves in the strip of garden between my house and studio.
Another air view of snow.
To mountains
The back porch went from a light dusting to a heavy icing,
How Art Finds You
Some force all around us brings art into our world,
arranges it in leaf patterns or drops politely pearled
on grass blades after rainstorms or on leaves blown to the gutter
in accidental patterns that create spontaneous clutter.
If they appointed art police and gave them all the duty
of curtailing the world’s art––all its grace and beauty,
to lock away the artists for superficial sin,
every night the the world would simply create art again.
It would mold its beauty from the shadows, from the dust,
to gather it around us as it seems it must.
It would blow it into wrinkles in the corners and crevasses,
crust snow onto branches and into mountain passes.
All these lovely forms imposed on all that we have known
are art descending on our world from where it has been blown.
“You” for The Sunday Whirl
.
\
You
We could share a lifetime in some connected place
and I would never lose my awe of your familiar face.
Years relaxing into it will seem a weekend trip:
mere hours to memorize your mouth––that classic upper lip.
Then when at last we’re in our home, I’ll have the whole of you
emblazoned in my memory with nothing left to do
but to enjoy the “all” of you, not just your face and form––
that heart and soul and seed of you that creates your corm.
For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: lifetime share relax connect place last class awe home will years trip. (A corm is a short, thickened underground plant stem that stores starches and nutrients to fuel the plant’s growth.)
Not My Day!!!
Illustration by AI
This is not my day. If called upon to list everything that could go wrong, I would just give a list of what did go wrong today. First, my computer erased all of my bookmarks and favorites…and along with them, the only way I know to access my blog to write a new blog, view stats, correct an old blog, to read the blogs of others. Not to mention how to access Wordle! It may be obvious to you how to do so, but I am, first of all, directionally challenged. Always have been. I have to figure out one way to do things or to go places and then always do it that way…and the way I know how to get to everything I do on my computer is via my bookmarks and favorites bar. So, after hours and hours of trying to accomplish tasks, none of which worked out, I went out to swim, only to discover that Pasiano had not told the new gardener to empty the pool and fill it with warm water. Nor did he tell him not to leave the gates open and so Zoey got trapped between the fence and the wall and was crying pitifully which made a trip out in the driving rain necessary. Why do I have a new gardener, you ask? the horrible answer is that the same day I narrowly missed being the witness to a shooting in Peoria, Arizona, Pasiano was walking on the sidewalk in Ajijic and a sharp piece of metal flew off the back of a passing truck carrying welding supplies and hit him on the side of the head–of course slicing his head open and knocking him out. Surgery was completed at a local hospital and he is now recovering at home but can’t work for a month. What was my near miss? My sister and I came out of the Safeway store in Peoria, Arizona, after a short 20 minute shopping expedition to find our car as well as a number of cars in our area of the parking lot fenced in by a long yellow crime tape, and in the lanes in front of our car was a fire truck, ambulance, four police cars and too many policemen to count. It seems that a man had been shot in truck a few cars away from us and the woman who shot him had escaped. Later we found she had driven to a nearby lot and committed suicide. The man, on the other hand, did not die, but it occurred to us that the shooting must have occurred very close to the time we left our car and went into the store as only 20 minutes had passed between our going into the store and returning to our car and already the lot was full of emergency vehicles when we came out. All-in-all, quite a momentous week.
Now, I seek escape. No pool. No computer. Three attempts to order a set of sheets on Mercado Libre did not pan out in the end…always some glitch. Perhaps I’ll try to watch the movies I couldn’t get to work in my video player before I left to go to Arizona…Crossed fingers. The jinx can’t go on forever. I am so glad Pasiano will recover… that should cancel out all my petty complaints. Shut up, Judy. Just. Shut. Up!!!!!
Today’s Fibs
Wrinkles Can Be Beautiful
for Fibbing Friday, today’s word chores are:
How would you define these words?
1 Biblioklept: The theft of a Bible.
2. Acnestis: Small clusters of facial pimples.
3. Wrest pin: A bracelet.
4. Agelast: Initial name for Botox.
5. Peristeronic: An area surrounded by buildings of historic significance.
6. Limerence: The act of constructing Limericks.
7. Sonder: As far beneath as possible.
8. Vellichor: Incredibly in tune.
9. Petrichor: A stony silence that comes between two musical choruses.
10. Lugubrious: Given to carrying heavy objects.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 