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Sparkles
I cannot figure out where to link this so I’m doing so HERE for the Lens-Artists Challenge.
A Glowing Moment for Lens Artists Challenge
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Author Archives: lifelessons
Plumeria: FOTD, April 8, 2023
For Cee’s FOTD
Party Animal
Party Animal
I trip and stumble,
fall and tumble
(Lately haste
not to my taste.)
Incapacitated? Yes!
What’s the reason? Can’t you guess?
Once, though I was hale and hearty,
life of every wild party,
now I draw less audiences,
fewer smiles and way more winces
as I slip up, toe or tongue
on syllables or ladder rung.
These faux pas once made due to whiskey
back when I was young and frisky
are due to age’s cruel spasms
instead of youth’s enthusiasms.
Prompts for today are trip, mumble, incapacitated, hale, draw andtaste. Photo by Hillary P on Unsplash
Generation, for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, Apr 8, 2023
Generation
My ration of the genes meted out to my family has, I admit, been wasted. I’ve had no children linked to my ancestors. I have helped raise my husband’s children and been a loving aunt to nieces and nephews, but my only creations have been stories and poems written on paper or a computer screen, handmade paper lifted from molds and deckles, jewelry formed from metal cut, patterned, forged and soldered and retablos constructed of the found fragments of other people’s lives. They are what I offer to upcoming generations: a brooch, a lamp, a retablo, a poem, a vignette or a book—these are the things i’ve given birth to that will perhaps live after me.
The prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “start with gen.”
Other prompts for today are trip, mumble, incapacitated, hale, draw and taste.
Checklist
I very rarely reblog a post, but I love this Checklist by Xan. It’s very short so unfortunately it is all viewable here. Please go to Xan’s post to make comments as well as here so the author knows you appreciated it, too.
Pet the cat
Feel the sunshine on your face
Stop and smell the flowers
But move with your brothers and sisters
Toward justice
Welcome new souls
And celebrate lost ones
Be troubled when you’re young
and troublesome in your age
and make good trouble all your life
Fill up your hungry belly
And someone else’s too
Love your neighbor as yourself
Honor your gods
However you see them
Raise your children
To love life
And mourn death
And make good trouble
In a new day
NaPoWriMo Day 7, prompt: a list
Wildflowers and Cattails at the Beach FOTD Apr 7, 2023
For Cee’s FOTD
Bucket List
Bucket List
I have learned it is not wise
to reveal to other eyes
one’s bucket list lest they despise
those things that you
have chose to do
that they eschew.
Their judgement might be too severe
for what you’ve yearned for, year on year—
to saddle up a wild deer
and ride for miles through his world,
fearing not that you’ll be hurled
to die out in the wild, not curled
within your room of board and nail
with loved ones there to hear you wail,
wanting to help, to no avail.
Or, to choose a pilot that you trust
to carry you to some high gust
that will waft you, chuteless, down to dust.
Do not dismay, oh friends of mine.
Do not doubt and do not pine
because I’ve chosen to decline
that death bed pressed and white and clean
with prolongation by machine
devoid of beauties of the scene
of forest, ocean, mountain, beach—
those places that by choice I’ll reach
more quickly in that final breach.
Know that the wildness of their lending
creates for me less painful wending
toward my journey’s final ending.
For NaPoWriMo 2023, Day 7, we are to write a list poem…or an anti-list poem. That certainly widens the field!!!
I”m combining this prompt with my usual poem that makes use of prompts from six different blogs. The prompts are linked to their source. Today they are: wise, dismay, bucket, severe, trust and nails.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Cruel Comedy: NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 5
Cruel Comedy
The campfire collapses into a plaintive rune,
echoing the plangent wolf call of a loon
that floats the silver pathway of the water-jellied moon.
I face our final parting. As I hear its taunting croon,
the humid night surrounds me in its tight cocoon.
Life is a cruel comedy whose laughter ebbs too soon.
This is the NaPoWriMo prompt for April 5:
Begin by reading Charles Simic’s poem “The Melon.” It would be easy to call the poem dark, but as they say, if you didn’t have darkness, you wouldn’t know what light is. Or vice versa. The poem illuminates the juxtaposition between grief and joy, sorrow and reprieve. For today’s challenge, write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.
Happy writing!
Speaking in Tongues: NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 6,
Our assignment was to pick a poem in a foreign language we didn’t know and to write a poem saying what we think it means. I have done this twice for NaPoWriMo in the past 13 years so I’m going to say turnabout is fair play and do a reblog. My excuse is that I have literally been on the phone, internet and emails for 12 hours trying to do my taxes… dealing with banks in U.S and mexico, Charles Schwab, my investment people and my sister. Going crazy!!! A friend just pointed out I hadn’t don’t NaPoWriMo for the first time yesterday and today. Mea Culpa. I’ve been distracted. So, here are the first two stanzas of my poem “guessing” what the original poem in Dutch might have been saying:
Messages in Bottles
Messages they send out to the world in bottles
(those they think up as they stir their morning cups of chocolate)
—beware their dangers.
These messengers have hands that can slap you awake,
then abandon you as they return to the problems of the privileged rich.These parasites, dosed with their vitamin B, ride roughshod over their hosts.They linger in their beautiful dreams of percentages,
profit on the hunger of the poor.
They see not your skeletons when they look in the mirror.
They do not see the hearts they have broken.
Once, surrounded by the stricken, they put their fingers in their ears
and pretended they were evangelists to the poor.
Then, their illusions shattered by going door-to-door, they slammed doors shut again.
(those they think up as they stir their morning cups of chocolate)
—beware their dangers.
These messengers have hands that can slap you awake,
then abandon you as they return to the problems of the privileged rich.These parasites, dosed with their vitamin B, ride roughshod over their hosts.They linger in their beautiful dreams of percentages,
profit on the hunger of the poor.
They see not your skeletons when they look in the mirror.
They do not see the hearts they have broken.
Once, surrounded by the stricken, they put their fingers in their ears
and pretended they were evangelists to the poor.
Then, their illusions shattered by going door-to-door, they slammed doors shut again.
And here is the link to the rest of my poem as well as the original poem and its real translation: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/04/21/speaking-in-tongues-napowwrimo-2020-day-21/
Reblogged For NaPoWriMo 2023, Day 6
Retire in Mexico?
Retire in Mexico?
I never thought retirement
would ever be the way I went,
so imagine my embarrassment
when I found my instincts leant
toward letting my employment go
and heading down to Mexico!
When I checked out the internet
to see what info I could get,
it led me to a rendezvous
that told me what I had to do.
It’s been no struggle, you can see,
Retirement was made for me!!!
Prompt words are cusp, rendezvous, retirement, struggle, embarrassment and internet.
