Monthly Archives: July 2020

Who Needs an Election?

Who Needs an Election?

Our perfunctory president is not in any hurry
to pack his suitcase.  He’s a rat that’s unequipped to scurry.
Unready to give up his throne., he thinks we are in need
of his gross incompetence, his racism and greed.
How could his teeming vassals unseat their liege-lord now?
How dare his noble lackeys desert their sacred cow?
Are they in their right minds, seeking to end his power?
Must he desert his White House and make do with his tower?

His orange countenance grows pale. His comb-over descends.
He thought that he would rule our world ’til he was in Depends!
If he could only change the rules, how great that it would be
to play his “Trump,” enabling him to found a dynasty.
First Junior, then Ivanka could inherit his domain.
What other tyrant is equipped to take over his reign?
This liberty these fools taut can’t hold a candle to him.
His light is needed now the torch of liberty’s gone dim.

No need for an election. The world’s too dire for that.
He’ll gladly serve another term growing sleek and fat.
He’ll sack Social Security and supplement the riches
of all the moneyed classes. Never mind the foreign bitches
who have swarmed into the congress. Send those tawny women home—
the sacred halls of governance better suit a gnome
who carries golf clubs as his scepters and overlooks derision
to fuck the whole damn world according to his crazy vision.

“Heil Trump,”  his swastika’d supporters chant. “And damn the Jews!”
“Crucify the liberals,” is shouted from the pews
of those for whom religion is being blindly led,
forsaking what is written in favor of what’s said.
As lambs led to the slaughter, let us bleat and blindly scamper
after all the rich men that we were born to pamper.
We do not need good health care, let alone good food or shelter.
Long Live Trump! Who cares if the whole world goes “Helter Skelter?”

 

Prompt words are unready, perfunctory, racismscurry and suitcase. Image  from Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Lighting of All Kinds: for Cee’s B&W Challenge

 

Please click on the photos to enlarge them.

For fourteen years before I moved to Mexico, my husband and I made hundreds of art lamps–no two the same. He did the stone and wood structures and I did the willow structures and also made the washi paper from mulberry bark to create the shades or outer coverings. 

For Cee’s B&W Lighting of all kinds.

THE EGG AND ALL: FIVE PHOTOS, FIVE STORIES CHALLENGE

I am reblogging this blog on breaking eggs and unbroken yolks in honor of Word of the Day’s prompt word “Unbreakable,” which was posted too late to make it into my earlybird poem published earlier today!

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2020/07/30/unbreakable/

lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

DSC00387 THE ORCHIDS AND AMAZING LEMON SOUFFLE ACCOMPANIED THE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR DIANA–A NEW FRIEND OF MINE AND A LONGTIME FRIEND OF SHARON, WHO PROVIDED MOST OF THE EGG-ASSOCIATED PLOT POINTS FOR THIS STORY.

DSC00395 SINCE SHARON HAD SPENT ALL DAY BREAKING AND BEATING EGGS AND SQUEEZING AND ADDING LEMONS, NOT TO MENTION DRIVING ME OFF IN PURSUIT OF GIANT LIPS TO PHOTOGRAPH, SHE REMAINED UNCHARACTERISTICALLY SILENT AS JOANN REGALED US ALL WITH TALES OF FILM MAKING AND DISTRIBUTION. SHE’S A GOOD STORYTELLER, AND JOHN (AS WELL AS THE REST OF US) LISTENED WITH PLEASURE.

DSC00397 DIANA, WHO WAS BUSY TRYING TO RECOVER FROM A CASE OF SHINGLES, WAS A VERY GOOD EGG AND SEEMED TO BE ENJOYING THE EVENING HELD IN HER HONOR.

DSC00399 MEANWHILE, SHARON, ALTHOUGH SILENT, HAD BRAIN ACTIVELY ENGAGED, PROMPTED BY JOANN’S TALES OF A HORROR MOVIE SHE PRODUCED AND DIRECTED YEARS AGO. NURSING MOTHERS MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW…

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Early Riser

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 6.23.13 AM.png

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 6.23.13 AM.png Yesterday’s helpers, no help for today! Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 6.23.13 AM.png

Early Riser

Asleep before midnight, I wake before dawn,
and though I stretch and stifle a yawn,
here I am blogging—intrepid adventurer.
For once, no sleepy sunrise malingerer.

The dogma of habit broken this morning,
I retrieve my prompt words without any warning
that two of my regulars are still unhosted.
The person responsible has not yet posted!

So I end up my poem feeling lost—broken-hearted.
If I’d known two were missing, I wouldn’t have started.
I might have slept longer if I had known
that I’d have to come up with more words of my own!

Prompt words today are dogma, intrepid and midnight. (Alas, Ragtag and Word of the Day were not yet available.)

Blackbirds over Lake Chapala 2

A couple of hours of looking through old photos of the non-digital sort yielded two photos of the blackbirds whose sunset flights were described in this poem. In these photos, they have not yet gathered into the chains they form to fly to the cornfields between Chapala and Guadalajara. Here they are just lifting out of the acres of cattails that rimmed the lake back when it was shrinking in size. This is just one wave of birds. After it lifted, there would have been another and another—tens of thousands of birds—as I recall, some yellow-winged and some red-winged blackbirds. In the years since then, the lake has thankfully come up to its original banks, as at the time I moved here in 2001 there were places in which you had to take a taxi from the pier to get out to the lake. It was estimated that the lake would be totally gone within five years, but luckily people banded together to save it. I’m glad to have the lake restored and there are still thousands of white pelicans as well as numerous egrets and herons and other birds, but I do miss those glorious swells of blackbirds.

(If you want to see the birds, you need to click on photos to enlarge them.)