Bite
The gardener sprays the water wide
in an arc from side to side.
The old dog moves out of its path.
No one knows her held-in wrath
for all who hold the power but she––
the door for which she has no key,
the young dog taking power away,
as she grows weaker every day.
The universe is never kind
to those caught in the crushing grind
of power eroding day by day.
Surrender is the price we pay.
Commanding, shy, flamboyant, staid––
everyone falls to the blade.
For all, it is the price that’s paid–
by tyrant and by serving maid.
What has happened to stay my hand?
I’ve read the words both fine and grand
that other poets have been writing
and envy has commenced its biting.
What I write is merely babble.
It’s obvious I only dabble.
These words I have so easily found.
surely cannot be profound.
The gardener sprays the water wide
in an arc from side to side,
in a move so sure and quick,
quenching inspiration’s wick.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
I LOVE this poem, and the photo is amazing.
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You don’t do “merely babble”, my dear. That “everyone falls to the blade” stanza is just excellent. I’m just off about a 10 month writing hiatus where I couldn’t think of anything to say.
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Linda, in four years of doing NaPoWriMo, I just this year found the page where you can publish your link to your day’s writing. With the thousands signed up for it, I kept going to the blogs of people who had signed up but hadn’t written a poem and gave up on the process, just writing my poems and sending them out without links. When I actually found the people who were writing to the prompts, I was really impressed by the caliber of writing and suddenly felt pretty third rate and embarrassed. As a matter of fact, this morning I was a bit depressed by it and since I’d lost a cap on my front tooth and looked a bit like a meth addict in the mirror, it didn’t bolster my image. Ha. This poem was a product of that. I wasn’t going to publish it, but forgottenman talked me into posting it. At any rate, thanks for helping to bolster my flagging confidence. In the past we could have blamed it on “that time of month.” Perhaps it was the ghost of that time of month! xox
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I think you’d already gone off your hiatus when you were in La Manz. You wrote some good things there, as I recall.
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What a great poem and matching image.
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Like the photo and your take on mortality. TC Sent from my iPad
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In the frivolous effort to swallow and chew our own pains, we often forget how to find beauty and how to admire it, and also acknowledge it that it always comes first from an honest heart. So, do not think your words are a babble, on the contrary, I found undertones in your poem that make me think about life, as well as relate with mundane things (Do these gardeners ever turn the sprinklers off? I swear, if I wanted to walk past grass at 3 am, I’d find them, on. )
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