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Reflections for CWBC
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Puddle-Jumping
Puddle-Jumping
Raindrops fall and splat and skitter,
bringing sheen and gloss and glitter.
In my dreams I hear them falling,
try to wake to heed their calling.
When exactly do I know
it’s time to leave my bed and go
outside to splash in rain-filled gutters,
ignoring Grandpa’s warning mutters
that I’ll catch a cold today
if I go outside to play?
He says it’s raining cats and dogs,
but all I find outside are frogs,
proving his idiom a lie
as nothing’s falling from the sky
but rain and blossoms from the tree
that stretches its limbs over me.
I make my way, laborious,
through mud and goo most glorious,
then reach the ditch and wash feet off
in the rushing water trough.
I see Grandpa watching me,
warm and dry and splatter-free.
But then he’s gone, no doubt to see
what’s playing now on the TV.
But, just as it begins to pour,
there’s Grandpa coming out the door!
Barefooted, he jumps in my puddle,
gives my shoulders a warm cuddle,
then repeats the old refrain
that this day is “Right as rain!”
Prompt words today are rain, idiom, skitter, exact, dreams.
Images by Amy Reed and Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash. Used with permission.
FOTD, July 23, 2021
Sex in the Movies
Sex in the Movies
Brits may call it shagging and in the States it’s screwing,
but both these terms only describe the action that they’re doing.
Increasingly, both movies and TVÂ seem dedicated
to insuring that their viewers are sexually educated.
I admit I’m stymied at the surreal acts depicted.
Somehow the warmness of the act seems to have been evicted.
Loving touch seems relegated to a foreign place
and athleticism substituted in its place.
My aunt once said she didn’t know what bedroom scenes were for.
We’d know what they were doing if they just shut the door.
I quipped, “Not exactly,” and she shot back, “Well, I would,”
and with that, stopped discussion, sealing it well and good.
Ending in an impasse, we left it where it stood.
I would have issued no rejoinder, even if I could.
It was a family joke for years but now I have been caught.
I finally must admit that I’ve joined her in the thought.
Prompt words today are stymie, warm, screw, surreal and shag.
Image by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash. Used with permission.
A Woman Alone: for the Sunday Writing Prompt
A Woman Alone
I am airborne in the hammock,
the small dog on my stomach,
but patting the bigger dog
on the ground below us
to assuage his jealousy.
I watch this week’s brand of butterflies
popping like popcorn
above the audacious flowers
of the tabachine bush,
and that confused hummingbird
that has mistaken the Soleri bell for a flower.
I eat pizza at midnight
and swim naked in the pool at 2 am.
My cats know my sins
and like me better for them.
When I talk to the air,
it is unclear whether I talk to the cats
or to myself.
Who might the neighbors think I am talking to?
Some new lover?
Most probably not.
Those of us who live alone
are never really quite alone in Mexico,
where private lives
are so easily shared
in spite of walls.
It is as though
sounds echo more easily
in the high mountain air,
and we become one large family,
putting up with each other’s secrets.
But, no responsibility
for husband or children or roommates,
we sink into the luxury of selfishness.
Sleeping at odd hours,
wearing our pajamas from bedtime
to wake-up
to next bedtime,
calling out to the gardener from behind curtains,
accustoming the housekeeper to our sleepless nights
and long mornings of slumber.
No one to explain the junk drawer to,
or the large accumulation of toilet paper rolls,
for which you have a definite purpose
that you never quite get around to.
The luxury of a nude body
no one else short of the doctor
will ever see.
The back of your head
where snarls can exist
unchallenged
until the next trip to town.
The Petit Ecole cookies
you need not share
with anyone.
The unmade bed uncensored.
The best hammock always your own.
An internet band unshared.
Only your toothbrush in the glass beside the sink.
Every leftover cup of coffee
sitting on surfaces around the house
one you can sip out of
with no fear of any disease
other than the ones you already harbor.
Alone.
What you always feared.
That fear now behind you.
You were so wrong.
Your Life’s a Journey: Wordle 510, July 18, 2021
Your Life’s a Journey
If you feel that life’s a game—
pictures leaping from the frame,Â
its lyrics just a canned refrain,
events linked like a preformed chain.
If what you do seems like a dream,
your actions not what they may seem.
If you find yourself receding
where you’d prefer that you were leading.
If you’re forced into a space
where you seem to vanish without a trace,
just reach out and touch the screen.
Apply your shoulder. Push and lean.
Break out from where you feel you’re trapped.
Rip up the course that fate has mapped.
Shed its pattern. Jump off its shelf.
Live a life you’ve planned yourself.
Your life’s a journey you’re mean to plan
and if you try, I know you can.
Walk the road of your own choosing.
Any other way is losing.
Prompt words for Wordle this week are: chain, lean, game, screen, seem, recede, space, frame, dream, lead, shed, refrain.
Flowers in the Park, FOTD July 22, 2021
Cracked
Cracked
My thoughts are arabesques that curl—now looser and now tight.
They coalesce, then part again to let in needed light.
When ponderings go underground, they tend to matte and cloy,
but when they leave some room within, they seem to invite joy.
So in between colloquial thoughts, I wedge out open spaces
where I can I leave some fractures, inviting fresh new traces
of innovative modes of thought and bright new points of view
so bit by bit, over the years my attitudes accrue.
Prompt words for the day are coalesce, colloquial, fractures, cloy and underground.
Associated Press Reports US life expectancy in 2020 saw biggest drop since WWII
“NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said Wednesday.” Covid accounts for 11 percent of the drop. Drug use, homicides, overcrowding and lack of healthcare accounts for much of the rest. See the facts HERE.
The Meeting Place (for Dverse Poets)
The Meeting Place
What are you waiting for––
divine inspiration?
Do you think Shakespeare waited for his muse?
And if your muse came,
would you even recognize her?
Will she wear long white flowing robes?
Will she play a lute or will your voice
be her instrument?
Will she whisper in your ear or speak to you
though your mind?
And will she be beautiful or will that even matter?
As you age will your muse age with you
or is she perpetually young?
And what about wisdom?
Will it be your own acquired wisdom or hers
that will make your words cut like a knife
though the soft texture of days,
that will give them purpose
when those around you
fail and fall
into the magnetic cloud
of forgetfulness or boredom?
What if as you sit there
waiting for your muse,
watching reality TV
or doing crossword puzzles,
your muse is waiting for you
in the keys of your computer
or in your pen point?
What if she has been lolling all these years
in the pages
of that lined notebook
sitting empty on your shelf?
I keep telling you
that every day I see her
pass behind you
as you pine for her,
always looking
in the opposite
direction.
