Monthly Archives: January 2025

Gossip at the 50th Class Reunion, For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 689, Jan 12, 2025

Gossip at the 50th Class Reunion

The ghosts of teenage memories flutter and alight,
recalling card game  marathons that lasted through the night,
revealing ruinous secrets—spilling all the dirt.
After all these decades, how much could they still hurt?

Alluring little tattle-tales,  spinning out their webs,
sully reputations of aging former debs.
whose glittering reputations are maligned in manners ruthless,
by stories pulled out from the past that they insist are truthless.

Their former chastity like glass, cracked, broken and shattered
fifty long years afterwards–as if it even mattered!
We’ve strayed so far from our old roots, why is it we demur
when someone tries to alter what we insist we were?

Note from the author: Pure fiction, folks! Only the photo is of my real class reunion. I was led to this rhyme by the prompt words, not the past! For the Sunday Whirl Wordle the prompt words were: ruinous cards glass alluring spin dirt flutter secrets roots ghost glitters web 

Planted Hopes, for Lens Artist Challenge #331, Jan 11, 2025

In a way, plants have built the world as we know it by helping to break apart the stone and restoring life. Here are some examples from my property. Click on photos to enlarge and to read the stories of these resilient little plants.

 

For Lens Artists Challenge.    the prompt is resilience.

The Knitted and the Purled for RDP, Jan 11, 2025

 

The Knitted and the Purled

Ups and downs create the whole of our amazing world,
its surface formed by contrast of the knitted and the purled.
Sometimes we’re given what is sweet, at other times the bile
as we choose moment by moment to live happily for a while.

Nothing in this world can exist happily ever after.
A house is built of lows and highs: foundation before rafter.
Up and down’s the truth of it, the brilliant and the dark.
No week is composed totally of Sunday in the park.

Existence is a pendulum that sweeps across our lives.
Worker bees die every day in service to their hives.
Good seems finely balanced by a constant lurking evil.
Roses have their aphids.  Cotton has its weevil.

There is so much that’s wonderful in the world we live in,
but no one wins at every game. Sometimes we have to give in,
playing with the cards we’re dealt—flush or straight or fold—
sometimes in the heat of luck, sometimes out in the cold.

 

For RDP Saturday: Knit

Bougainvillea, FOTD Jan 11, 2025

The bougainvillea has never been so lush as this year after the months of rain.

Victim # 7

Alas, Pasiano, too, caught in the grip of the red nose!  Who or what will be next?

for The Daily Prompt, Jan 11, 2025

Little Worlds

 Little Worlds
(Ode to a Tiny Fungi on the Rainforest Floor)

What little worlds are lost to us
there on the jungle floor
as, looking up,
we tread them underfoot.

Perhaps whole civilizations
extinguished on those orange orbs—
A solar system of planets with their denizens
too microscopic for us to see.

Heedless Gods we are, our mighty glances
overlooking much of what’s beneath us.

But for the camera lens,
how much more we would miss
as we go about our busy greater world.

Memories of the Lacandón jungle, 2008. Other small memories of that adventure are below (fungal and non-fungal.) Please click on photos to enlarge.

The Daily Prompt for Jan 11 is “It’s the little things.”

Daily Prompt Daily Prompt for Jan 10, 2025

Echoes
That echo in your heart is the dove in you
that carries the message that you want to fly.
Soaring dove, I want to ride on your back
to the crack of sunrise—to the day’s rebirth.

Time’s ricochet might drive us to the canyon’s rim,
where it will devour the past
no matter how grand its scale
and set us free from it.

The echoes of the world
passing and repassing
in their journeys
until they finally fade away.

 

The Daily Prompt is echo.

For Fibbing Friday, Jan 10, 2025

 

 

For Fibbing Friday the challenge is:

1.   Bafflegab–cryptic statements
2.   Batrachomyomachy-The study of the language of vampires.
3.   Boondoggle-The study of the language of Daniel Boone’s hound.
4.   Borborygmus-Who must be made to shut up?
5.   Bowyang-A male archer.
6.   Blitzkrieg-Breakfast served on the morning of a military attack.
7.   Brimborion-The protective sun brim on a celestial hunter’s hat.
8.   Boffola-a Hawaiian bison
9.   Boff-What you be when you leave.
10. Buzzwig-A bee’s hairpiece.

Bougainvillea for FOTD Jan 10, 2025

 

 

For FOTD

Meditations from My Room for dVerse Poets, Jan 9, 2025

Meadow Argus / Photographed in Solomon Islands / Michael Sammut

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.

For dVerse Poets

To see more poems written for this prompt, go HERE.