Author Archives: lifelessons

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About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

The Vacant Lot

The Vacant Lot

The vapors of a morning mist rise from the vacant lot.
It is a tract forgotten— our neighborhood’s biggest blot.
Each person’s in denial as to their distribution
of building rubble and garbage that’s their daily contribution

to this precarious tumble of rubble, junk and weeds
that every year grows higher and in whose jumble breeds
mosquitoes, rats and killer bees that invade my yard
making neighborly coexistence exceptionally hard.

Good fences make good neighbors I’ve found to be a myth.
To see the truth of this old adage, we must strip it to its pith.
For the stone wall that borders it, alas, has been infested
by a million angry worker bees whose well-being’s invested

in invading all their neighbors, driving dogs and human folks
back into their houses to avoid their neighbors’ pokes.
A precarious situation, at best, dear reader, for,
there is a dilemma present at its core.

If we want to eat their honey must we put up with their stings?
Must we coincide with every danger nature brings?
For the ending of the story, if you care, you now must wait.
For I will recite it at a later date.

Today’s prompt words are vapor, precarious, myth, tract, denial and vacant lot.

Echeveria: FOTD Aug 9, 2022

 

 

Almost a Flower.

For Cee’s FOTD

India Shot Lily: FOTD Aug 8, 2022

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Morning Cuppas

Cups of Java or Cups of Tea? Me, I just need my:

Morning Couplets

Every single day for years, my morning’s not replete
until my poem is published—polished and complete.

I meander through my sentences until I think they’re done,
and then I herd them into shape—each metaphor and pun.

My need is pathological to get them all just right.
I love words’ sensuality, their pathos and their bite.

Though some have a reluctance to show up when I call them,
there’s a satisfaction when I finally recall them.

What would I do with mornings if I had no words to play with?
There’d be nothing else for me to find to fill my day with!

Prompts for today are meander, sentence, pathological, replete, reluctance.

Reader’s Choice


Reader’s Choice.  Do you have a question you’d like to ask me or is there a topic you’d like to suggest? If so, please let me know and I’ll pick one suggestion a week to write about. Sorta setting up my own little personal prompt site, but others are welcome to write a post from the prompts as well and to link  them as comments on my  week’s post whenever they wish. Let’s see if this works. What do you want to hear me blather on about or to write a poem or song about? Reader’s Choice!!!! Please note that I won’t be making up prompts myself. I will, however, be publishing all the comments and all of the suggestions and if anyone else wants to write on one of the topics and post a link to comments, that will be most welcome. See? I repeated that invitation twice!

 

 

Unruly Posies: FOTD Aug 7, 2022

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Midnight Communion


Midnight Communion

Grass dampened by the night air sprouts beneath me as I lie
here beneath the swirling stars that spark an empty sky.
The moon sketches my shadow against the garden wall,
temporary art that holds me in its thrall.
Caught up in the orbit of a world that must astound me,
I am sister to a universe that’s breathing all around me.

 

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 565. the words are: damp stars sparks swirl sisters breathe empty sprouting shadows sketch orbit art. Image by Josh Miller @Unsplash.

First Crush

 

Prompts today are understand, whim, approval, hinder, systematic and absolutley.

Lately I am finding that every other poem or so shows up in the reader in paragraph form rather than in centered stanzas. Has anyone else found this to be true? To try to remedy it, today I took a screen shot of the poem and published it as a media file rather than the regular way. I’d be interested in hearing your comments about how this affects your viewing and also hearing from those having the same problem.  Thanks, Judy

CFFC: Nature’s Beauty

Click on Photos to Enlarge.

 

For this prompt: https://ceenphotography.com/2022/08/02/cffc-reminds-you-of-natures-beauty/

Bubbles!!!

These photos need to be enlarged to view.

 

I somehow published an old prompt for Ragtag in my poem today, so here is a photo response to today’s correct prompt:  https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/08/06/rdp-saturday-bubbles/