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Today is the saints day for the Virgin of Guadalupe and skyrockets and church bells have been going off since 6 A.M. It seems fitting that I show the Virgin and her floral offerings as well as a display of fresh kalanchoe blossoms in honor of Our Lady of the Roses. They are as close to roses as I can get in my garden.
For Cee’s FOTD
Cantankerous
Grandpa is displaying his usual disposition,
expressing all his anger with excessive exposition.
He’s feeling most litigious and says that all the dang
liberals and Democrats should be sentenced to hang!
To Hell with all the secrecy. Sound the fire sirens
and lynch all left wing voters found in our environs.
If it were up to him they’d draw and quarter, limb-from-limb
every gol-durn voter who does not vote like him!
Prompt words today are hang, litigious, secrecy, disposition, sound. Image by Charles Buchler on Unsplash.
Fiction, Dolly!!!!
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How Nature Heals
Here beneath the open sky
all possibilities flow by.
Channels cut through Earth by time
contain the base and the sublime.
Heaven and Hell equally mixed
within a world man thinks he’s fixed,
but the urgency of mankind’s rule
often brands him as a fool.
Serial acts to gain control
have ripped our planet from Pole to Pole.
Disasters far beyond our range
to remedy with tardy change––
threaten with an urgency
that nature in resurgency
thrusts in our faces. Fire storms
plague us as our planet warms.
Hurricanes and flooding rains
show us how nature disdains
our engineering of global drought,
water we can’t do without
and yet, when sent with too much zeal,
destroys what it was meant to heal.
Could it be that nature’s fuss
is meant to do away with us?
The prompt words are: rule open sky beneath within hell heaven flow channel urgency time serial for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 582
Parting Manifesto
All the reasons you have vetted
(reasons I should feel indebted)
are reasons that I question, so,
I can’t accept your tales of woe.
Those monstrous acts you say I’ve done?
It is a fact that I’ve done none.
And all the things you say you’ve bought?
The fact is that I bought the lot!
Your bags are packed and by the door.
Load up that sports car you adore
and take yourself right down the road.
I’m closing up the mother lode!
For, though I’ll miss our hugs and smooching,
I won’t miss your constant mooching.
It’s time you joined the teeming mob,
got off your keister and got a job!!!!
Prompt words today are question, indebted, monstrous, like.
Vanity Mirror
Your grace leaves courters spellbound and at a slight impasse,
for they’d like to woo you, but they do not have the brass.
Ordinary fellows feel they’ve not the right
to ask you for a date in fear they may incite
a cacophony of laughter revealing your disdain
at their misguided efforts—that they would even deign
to think that they were worthy of such a one as you,
deserving of the honor to stoop and kiss your shoe.
Do you feel the portrait that I sketch deserving of your buzz?
Or do you get the message: pretty is as pretty does.
Prompt words today are grace, spellbound, cacophony, impasse, ordinary and sketch.
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Bigger and brighter and more exotic flowers abound in the garden, but this is Zoe’s choice. Actually, she was starting to eat it when I caught her and she quickly shifted to pretending she was smelling it.
For Cee’s FOTD
Mexico Saves Daylight
Nobody knows
what this new day
has in store for us.
The colors stolen by night
have not come back yet––
only the string of miniature Chinese lanterns
strung on the patio
glow their soft tones:
lavender, yellow, peach, rose, lime green.
Powered by energy stolen from the sun,
they light up this very early morning darkness
otherwise lit by the random stars of
streetlights undulating over roads that wind up foothills.
The mountain peak named Señor Garcia
stands against the gray predawn sky.
Colima volcano peers over his shoulder,
half-obscured by mist and clouds.
My day emerges.
Scatterings of lights twinkle
from the small pueblos across the lake.
Bats swoop and dart
after the last insects of the night,
then speed impossibly into second-story tejas
for their communal day’s rest.
The hot tub cover,
submerged a few inches beneath the water’s surface,
forms a mirror for the wild hair of palm trees.
Dried leaves rest on the water,
swirling in the breath of morning.
Roosters crow.
A cacophony of bird calls:
“Me hee hee hee hee hee. Me hee hee hee hee hee Me.”
scolds the most persistent of the lot.
Mourning doves answer in a register from another time.
The grind of trucks accelerating on the roadway far below
too small for trucks.
Church bells speak their language,
tolling the morning hour.
The round
subtle drone
of unseen bees
takes precedence
over all other sounds
as I move to the gazebo.
I picture a whole hive
moving to new quarters,
starting that process over again,
busy giving birth to their new home,
perhaps in the stark Guamuchil tree
that survives like a dinosaur
among the castor beans
in the jungled houseless lot next door.
Like one of those internet birthday cards
where an invisible hand
yields a brush
over a black and white drawing,
slowly, colors lost to the black night
emerge through the fog
of earliest morning blues and grays.
Rose pink of the first hint of sunrise.
Colors of houses on the mountains:
vivid orange and gold,
lime green and blue.
Bougainvillea silhouettes give way
to curly detail and bright color:
fuchsia, orange, peach, gold, brilliant white.
Three green foam noodles lie abandoned poolside,
caught in the arms of aloe vera
and by the crown of thorns.
Green washes the hillside
around the gold and brown
of last year’s corn stalks.
The diverse calls of grackles
join the morning conversation.
Quetzacoatl spreads his sinuous frame
over the entire wall above my bedroom doors
as though stretching his kinks out for the day ahead.
7:30 A.M., March 8, 2020,
announces the computer screen
glowing on my bedside table.
Coral sheets and a blue pillowcase.
A large watercolor of a woman
with birds perched on her shoulders
and her hands.
I yearn to go back to bed,
but time changed here
in the very early morning.
It is an hour later
than it was
the same time
yesterday.
Since 2022 marked the last year for Daylight Savings time in Mexico, I’m celebrating by reblogging this poem written on the beginning day of Daylight Savings time in Mexico in 2020–For Reena Saxena’s 2020 Challenge
as well as for dVerse Poets Open Link Night
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The year was 1973. I traveled through this area where highland farmers met and traded with lowland caravans who traded camel dung as fuel and other goods for food grown by the farmers. I ended up living in Ethiopia for a year and a half, mainly in Addis Ababa.
For Throwback Thursday–a glimpse into the past.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 