I see a fox, a bird, a man in a hat facing away from me, a bull, a native American, a masked man. Oh, and an elephant. Every time I look at this wall, I see a new creature in it. How many of them can you see and do you see any new things? If so, please share. So far, seven creatures.
Believe it or not, this was our main street, two blocks long!
Still Life With A Small Town Girl
For many years when I was small and far into my teens,
my summer days were filled with little else than magazines
and books and all the other things a girl in a small town
brings into her summers just to make the days less brown.
Day after day of reading soon led to dreaming, and
my shade beneath the cherry tree became a foreign land.
I did not know the name of it, but in this foreign place
the people did such lovely things. They kept a faster pace.
There were many things to see and people who liked doing—
circuses and carnivals, badminton and horse-shoeing,
imaginings and plays and travels. People who liked dancing.
Instead of trudging down the street, these people would be prancing.
I dreamed such dreams of bigger towns, and far-away towns, too.
All summer, I lay in the grass, dreaming what I’d do
when I was so much older and could go out on my own.
I’d wander off into the world. Explore the great unknown.
Now six decades later, I have done it all—
so many of those things I yearned to do when I was small.
I’ve been to places far and wide—Africa and Peru.
In England, France, Australia—I found so much to do.
Plays and concerts, dances, films, museums, garden walks.
Lectures, movies, workshops, classes, roundtables and talks.
Tours and treks and trips and sorties—guided meditations.
Somehow life seemed fuller packed with exotic vacations.
But now that I am seventy-six, I’d appreciate
if all this activity would finally abate.
I dream of slower days that I’d spend dreaming in the shade
where all my memories of days spent doing would just fade
into the past and leave me to dream here in this place,
swinging in my hammock, at a slower pace.
Leaving my activity to stream from head to pen,
filling up the page with all the places I have been.
Thus making sense of why I had to go and go,
speeding up the days that back then seemed to me so slow.
I guess I had to travel to find others of my kind
to teach me that life’s riches are mainly in the mind!
For dVerse Poets, we are to write a poem about a city. If you’d like to see more photos of my small town and environs, go HERE. And you can see how others responded to the prompt HERE.
mccmmc
Blunt Cut
(A Dear John Note from Rapunzel)
If my hair is a ladder, I’m cutting each rung
and closing the window from which they are hung.
Hope you find a good job since my decision to lop
off your means of support when I cut off my mop!
For RDP: Blunt
The doll pictured above was my favorite doll, ever. It was a Tiny Tears doll. You could feed it water through a bottle and it would either cry tears or pee. The body eventually rotted away, probably through accumulated “pee” that I neglected to rid her of, but I still have her head. And one of her arms and hands, I think.
Today’s Post is pictures numbered 125. Click on photos to enlarge.
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #4” Today’s number is 125. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find under that number and include a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.
This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below.
Click on photos to enlarge.
Click on photos to enlarge.
This picture might be a bit hard to interpret. I am actually taking a photo from my desk, looking out to the lights strung from the Virginia Creeper hanging down from the roofline. The room behind me is reflected in the glass. I love this photo and love these lights Yolanda and Pasiano insisted on stringing up for me. I like them so much that althought we’ve taken the tree and all the other decorations down, I can’t stand to take these down.
For Sunday Still’s Through a Window prompt
The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting
First thing in the morning, when I’m fresh from dreams,
your memory cuts so sharply through the day’s beginning that I wake.
Once, in that long dream of childhood, days were not over half so soon.
Early in September, below the slippery slide,
the steady beat of dribbling basketballs.
So many acts of bravery lost—
“Annie I Over” and “New Orleans.”
Way back in our salad years,
it was so very easy to trap wonder in a box.
The dominoes going head to toe.
All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire.
More in the air than possibility.
You would think there would be some remnant left.
Enough, I say!
It was the beginning of the end.
I’m counting steps from one to ten across my heart, then back again.
What you blindly get into in youth can be the end of you.
I must ask, is it me alone—
this bald horizon line, the teeth of far-off cliffs?
The tide comes in each morning.
That isn’t my heart beating with wild abandon.
I scream, I cry, I moan, I curse.
The rain is falling drop on drop.
All day long, the rain comes down,
writing this poem with water on cobblestones.
The moon like an animal hovers over and around our houses.
My life catches in its static house.
I am an ally of the truths that lie the whole world over,
though some of them are ill-begotten.
Since it is true, I must report.
Every day since birth, I have been emptying the cup.
My past drifts away from me.
I seem to fit my life now. I’m cozy in my skin.
Is it gain or loss to feel contentment?
A woman should be shrouded, silent, pregnant, dumb.
You crane your necks and stand and gawk.
Clap hands, you say, Clap hands to the music.
The act of creation is the greatest art.
For dVerse Poets, we were to make a poem from the first lines of one poem we published each month in 2023. Finding it almost impossible to sort through over a thousand posts made in the past year, I instead went through my file where some poems from past years are filed alphabetically. Selecting some poems from poem files A to D, I recorded first lines that seemed to be possible lines in a poetic compilation, then set about reordering them. This is the poem I came up with. The lines are exactly as they were in the 40 poems I borrowed the first lines from. The only changes made concerned punctuation and capital letters. The title is also from a first line.
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 