Monthly Archives: May 2020

Amazing Story

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Click on URL below to see video:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4639349809445506

The Groom Dances with Grandma

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The Groom Dances with Grandma

She struggles to keep time as they circle ’round the floor,
her flushed face with its rosy hues signaling “no more!”
This dancing she once lived for has come to be a task,
whereas the problem once was whether any boy would ask.

Standing in the wallflower line, wishing for a fella,
whereas sixty years later, a chair and an umbrella
would serve to meet her wishes, for this dancing in the sun
at her grandson’s wedding has turned out to be no fun.

What she needs in her dotage is not cognate with the dreams
of those age fifteen fantasies that burst her at the seams,
spilling out her future hopes, sure they’d be the same—
that there would be no change of rules in this living game.

Memories of graceful maneuvers through the night
remembered at one’s leisure are a pure delight.
Yet all those youthful dreams of blithely swirling ’round the floor
have matured into her fantasies of sneaking out the door.

Word prompts for today are rosy hues, circle, dancing, cognate and umbrella. Image by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Tabachine: FOTD May 16, 2020

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For Cee’s FOTD

At Home in the Studio

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Click on photos to enlarge.

This forced isolation has given me incentive to spend days in the studio. An artist challenge where we each contributed items to use in a collage resulted in many items left over so once I had completed my main piece, which you may view HERE, I decided to try to make more pieces from leftovers. The four wreaths are made out of 4 inch rings. We have no idea what they were for. I added the wrappings and embellishments. I then decided to make something of the large plastic straws I had contributed as well as the plastic discs with holes in the middle. I cut up and fringed the straws, then stacked them and pushed the bottom into a stack of the disks. Voilá–a cactus? bromeliad? not sure.

For the Home Photo Challenge.

Farming the Wind

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Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago when Forgottenman and I were driving through Iowa. Since I’ve never put it online before, thought I’d share it with you for Open Link night.

Farming the Wind

We pass a typical Iowa still life:
huge augers sipping the liquid mass of grain
from one of a trio of huge silos.
In the background, a cell phone tower
repeats the scaffolding over the corrugated iron silos,
mimicking nature’s patterning.

Twenty miles farther down the road,
we come upon other Brobdingnagians:
dozens of giant peace symbols rotating in what looks like the still air,
belying the motionless trees in their foreground.
Here nature fuels our technology in ways
that do not so obviously kill us
as petrochemicals or nuclear domes.

In clusters of evenly spaced rows,
the skeletal giants turn in graceful circles,
chronicling the passage of currents that carry the energy
that enables us to watch, cook, travel,
regulate temperature and communicate
without leaving our chairs.

We each become so comfortable in our close world
that we atrophy– venturing out less each year
into the world at large.

What does technology exist for–
to carry us forward or hold us back?
To destroy or support us?
The hugest irony of existence is that
everything is continuously changing:
movement to stillness and back.
Once stopped, will we ever be cognizant of this again?
Ever able to carry our wisdom forward from life to life?

This wind that blows us forward
also holds us back.
Which is the truth, which the contradiction?
These thoughts move
through our minds like the currents through the air,
bringing us to whatever truth we make of them.

This is the truth I find: Each thing contains its opposite.

 

To read posts from others responding to this prompt, go HERE.  To read the prompt at the dVerse Poets site, go HERE.

Meditations from My Room

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Click on photos to enlarge and view captions. A poem follows.

Art Studio
Today this new variety of swallowtail.
I have to catch them at rest. They whizz by too quickly to catch them in flight.
Now he’s not.
Diego and Morrie now think this is their studio as well.

Meditations from My Room

I share different  company in my isolation.
Dogs litter my studio floor,
and my backyard is
an in-between place for birds
passing as though at a freeway interchange,
this way and that.

A constant flutter of butterflies
stirs air around the orange and yellow thunbergia,
lush in this season that mixes sun and rain.
They soar down to the empty lot
and back again,
as though no creature can resist
collecting here in my domain.

Nature follows no rules of man.
It cannot learn obeisance or heed human leverage.
Our world, professional and polished—
how easily by nature now turned inward upon itself.

Our burnished world can hold no sway,
for nature heeds no golden cow.
Her empathy extended toward the broader view,
nature must change the things she can.
She has been patient  with us long enough. The time is now.

 

Prompt words today are empathy, leverage, patient, burnish and professional.

Succulent Bloom: FOTD May 15, 2020

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I think I’ve had this succulent plant for at least 15 years, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it bloom. The bloom is small, enlarged here. Click on photos to enlarge. Click on photos to enlarge:

For Cee’s FOTD

Mr. Crow

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I saw this beautiful fellow taking a bath a my friend Sharon’s house. If you’d like to know more about the occasion, go HERE.

For Tracy’s Corvid Challenge.

Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion

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Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion

“Pack up all your suitcases, we’re going on vacation.
Don’t forget your sleeping bags and some alimentation.
We’re heading out in two hours for the challenge of your lives,
so load up all your kids and hurry up your wives.
I’m making a pronouncement that perhaps you won’t agree with,
but since you are the folks that I most enjoy to be with,
I spent all of your legacies on this giant bus
that it is my fondest wish to fill with only us
and set out for the summer having various adventures.
Most likely we’ll get lost and perhaps Gram will lose her dentures,
but all-in-all we’ll have great times that no one will forget.
You’re going to spend this summer with the finer set.

I’ve cleared it with your bosses. I’ve contacted your friends.
No need to call anyone. No need to make amends.
You’ll live without your boyfriends for a month or two.
Just tell them that your family needs some time with you.
Go and find your places–kids all in the back.
I have some games to play with you while your mothers pack.
No phones, laptops or notebooks are allowed aboard the bus.
I want communication to be narrowed down to us.
I’ll teach you snakes and ladders, Monopoly and Chess.
You can beat your Uncle Tom and your Auntie Bess,
your grandma and your sisters, your cousins and your brother.
Why bother to beat someone else when you can beat each other?”

The ending you might well project. The mom’s find fault. The kids object.
But once he’d packed us all inside and started out on our grand ride,
we settled down and all joined in to get to know their closest kin
and all in all, that summer trip, each tent-pitching, each skinny dip
turned into one fine memory, just as Gramp knew it would be!

(Click on photos to enlarge and view as slide show.)

Morning brought Patti’s scrambled eggs

 

Prompt words today are pronounced, legacy, challenge, alimentation and suitcase. Sadly, this is fiction and the photos a compilation of various friends and family. I wish this had happened, but alas, it didn’t. The fourth photo is a picture of part of my actual family.

Hibiscus: FOTD May 14, 2020

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For Cee’s FOTD