Monthly Archives: March 2020

Four Days in La Manzanilla

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Breakfast in Paradise

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I almost entered these photos for Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt. These breakfasts at a beach restaurant in La Manzanilla, Mexico were as good as they looked!  Beautiful artistry for the eye and stomach.

Ginger: FOTD Mar 4, 2020

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For Cee’s FOTD

The Red Swimsuit

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Granted, this is a lovely window, but no one can deny that the red swimsuit dominates.

Here is my contribution to the Monday Windows Challenge.

Advice to Dorothy as She Elopes with the Tin Man

Advice to Dorothy as She Elopes with the Tin Man

I can’t fathom your limerence. Why would you settle
for an older lover who’s made out of metal?
It’s good to be flexible, but don’t you think
that this is a rather impossible link?
Your honeymoon’s bound to be rather a bust.
If you go to the beach, he is likely to rust,
or if you go skiing, his joints will freeze rigid.
It’s hard to make love to a tin man who’s frigid!
You’re young and you’re limber. Your life’s at its start.
Why pick a lover who hasn’t a heart?
Please take my advice when it comes to men:
no lions, no scarecrows, no men made of tin.

 

Prompt words for today are flexible, gambit, limerence, fathom and metal.

Pied Beauty II

apple pie!!

I wrote this “Apple” poem as a  parody of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty.” His poem is below mine…

Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

The dVerse Poetsprompt today is apples.

Anthurium: FOTD Mar 3, 2020

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This is the second blooming of this plant that just sort of petered out a few months ago. Looks like it has its strength back again. Photographed a few weeks ago before I left home.

For Cee’s FOTD

Mama’s Brief Lapse

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Mama’s Brief Lapse

I simply will not gossip. I’ll reveal not one small detail
about the time your mom decided, “No more buying retail!”
Hereafter, she’d cruise bargain basements, seeking out her booty.
Designer stores? Off-limits. Prada? Way too snooty.

This concept lasted months, at least, but it was just a phase.
One morning, she emerged as though she’d been in a haze
and had a small epiphany, there lying on her chaise,
climbed into her Ferrari and headed to Hermès

where the road to her recovery was smoothed by flattery
in corsetry and ballgowns, in sportswear and in hattery
as she restored her wardrobe with finery more grand
than she had ever managed buying second hand!!!

 

Prompt words today are smooth, snooty, details, haze and concept.

Which Way? Kitty Style.

Which Way? Kitty Style.
(Click on first photo to enlarge and read captions.)

 

For the Which Way Photo Challenge.

Extended Family

Extended Family

My furry raider sloshed through rain
out to the barn and back again,
but next trip was a passenger
his human cuddled close to her
so both could view the transient
new mother so intently bent
over her bounty, newly born
this blustery, rainy, wind-swept morn.

One more thing born that rainy day
around three homeless ones that lay
snuggled down within the hay
protected from the weather’s fray—
a sense of family between
an old male cat, once feral, mean—
who had been taken in himself
and these three waifs, curled on a shelf
within that barn where I’d found him.
Now both of us discovered them
and that day welcomed them, all three
to our extended family.

Prompt words today are raiderslosh, transient, bounty, and passenger.