For The Friday Reminder, the prompt is “Jelly.” This should be fun…
A Jellybelly Insight
What feels special in my belly?
Ice cream, peanut butter, jelly,
Scotchbread cookies, pecan pie
and all the chocolate I can buy.
Thus said, I bet that you can tell
my tummy’s padded pretty well.
And since my jeans I can’t fit into,
it’s salad I should have bit into.
Desert
Year by year, my heart grows sparser––
a lone cactus lifting arms heavenward in supplication.
My heart grows succulent,
hoarding moisture
to grow sparse blooms.
Roots go deeper, looking for that connection
that flows lower every year––
a shrinking lake leaving ringed memories on its edge
like a scrapbook of old loves.
Like that past we all shrink away from,
in living, I desert old loves.
In dying, they desert me.
Is their leaving named for the arid lands that I now ponder,
or is this desert a monument for those who have left first?
This poem was first published ten years ago today, July 10, 2016. I have reformatted the poem.
Hi friends! You might have noticed I’ve been sort of remiss in posting to my blog lately and in reading yours. I’ve had family visiting, am getting ready to go to the states for a hurried visit and I’ve also been preparing a manuscript to send to my formatter. Problem is, I’m not so sure that it is a book anyone will be interested in . With this in mind, if anyone is willing to have a look at it and give their opinions, I would much appreciate it. It is a bit under 75,000 words, 232 pages long. If you are someone I know in the blogging world and interested in having a look…no obligation to finish it…I’ll send you a document file of it to read on your computer. I have an oral PEECH copy, but don’t know how to save and send it. If you do, you could just listen to it.
Thanks, Judy
Glass En Masse
It’s sometimes seen as goblets stored upon a shelf
where you can either look right through or stare back at yourself.
In a glass of tea leaves, your future may be spoken,
but its message like its holder may slash us when it’s broken.
It is a perfect metaphor of all that we may be––
on one hand pure distraction, on the other help us see.
Whether it’s a looking glass or one you see right through,
The glass you stand in front of mostly tells us about you.
Reblog from Juoy 9, 2016.
photo with permission from Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash
Night of the Dragon
Behold the dragon, how it flows
from its tail up to its nose.
Thirty feet and thirty arms
move the dragon’s sinuous charms—
its razor teeth, its threatening frown—
through the streets of Chinatown.
On its head, a golden crown.
Its many humps move up and down,
forming valleys, growing hills
while moving over rocks and rills.
Straightening out to cross the bridges
spanning between neighboring ridges.
Never flying through the air,
rising only up the stair.
So many mortals make one beast,
one night a year to roil and feast
on errant spirits wandering out
their vile sentiments to flout,
chancing their ends once more to free
those rotten souls they used to be.
One night of all we form the back
that otherwise the dragons lack.
We form their arms and form their feet,
arousing awe in all we meet.
And thus it happens, once a year,
we become that which most we fear.
Reblog from 2019
Nocturn
With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––
I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a momentary interlude.
When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.
Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.
This is a “Rewind” Blog from July 7 ten years ago.
At 4 a.m. this morning, my niece was calling out in her sleep again for almost an hour, so I grabbed my laptop from the floor beside the bed to record her comments. Then as I was about to fall asleep with my computer on my lap, I had an idea for a poem. Without opening my eyes, I wrote it down before going back to sleep. Here it is, as I discovered it when I woke up this morning:
I’ve been axeoa rhw oxwN.
I’CW Ailws xeoaa rhw aw
ONLY RO SIAXOCWE
RHWEW IA NO PLxw doe mw
aILIF ON RHW VEINWY,
Ailinf on rhw qrwe.
InarwS I’M ARyinf ahoewaisw
wzXRLY QHWEW I OUFHR RWE.
My advice? Never write a poem in the middle of the night with your eyes closed.
I finally figured this out by putting my fingers on the correct keys and typing the gobbledygook, which came out close enough to the intended meaning for me to figure out the words. Here is what I meant to write:
I’ve been across the ocean,
sailed across the sea,
only to discover
there is no place for me
floating on the briny,
traversing the sea.
Instead I’m staying shoreside––
where I ought to be.
Write a comment…
Can’t help it. Had to debug my picture files. The prompt made me do it!!!
The prompt for RDP today is “Debugged.”
To play along, go to your photos file folder and type the number 748 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.
Here are my photos. Click on photos to enlarge and move on to next photo. Anxious to see yours!
To play along, go to your photos file folder and type the number 748 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.
Here are my photos. Click on photos to enlarge and move on to next photo. Anxious to see yours!
Yikes! is that a scorpion? Actually, this is a bottle of mescal my student Eduardo gave me last year for my birthday. Inside were three giant scorpions and a coral snake. So far everyone who has visited me has given it a miss, as have I. It is rumored that a sip of it will bolster a man’s virility.
Creature Discomforts
Lest you suffer a hot foot in the darkness of the night
as you journey to the bathroom and feel a sting or bite,
best slip into your shoes first before you journey there
lest a scorpion or spider gives a wound that you can’t bear.
Then in the brightness of the day, out in the prairie grass,
God grant that you’re not bitten in the ankle or the ass
by a coral snake who wounds you and is off, then, in a shot,
leaving you with ashen face, intestines in a knot.
Wishing you were dead, perhaps, instead of in such pain
that you vow that you will never walk in waist-high grass again
lest it lead to the resurgence of encounters with that snake
who surely you could fight off with a pistol or a rake
Better that you face it in bottle of mescal
than bushwhacking through the grasslands or walking down the hall.
if only you had seen it, but now that subject’s moot.
If you ever walk this way again, you’ll bring a gun–and shoot!
The words for Sunday Whirl this week are: shot foot dark bright prairie grass hot ash dead resurgence fight god
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
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sailed across the sea,
only to discover
there is no place for me
floating on the briny,
traversing the sea.
Instead I’m staying shoreside––
where I ought to be.I finally figured this out by putting my fingers on the correct keys and typing the gobbledygook, which came out close enough to the intended meaning for me to figure out the words.
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