Foolish Pride
He folds his arms.
She seals her mind.
Their last contact
back-to-back.
Each sure the other
meant to wound,
pride seals their futures.
Sad ending remembered
for a lifetime.
For The Things Unsaid, 30 words or less
Painting by Ron Hicks
In case you don’t know, Zoe was spayed yesterday afternoon. Mom was worried, but Zoe seems to have come through it with flying colors. The vet said Just as she was giving her the shot to anesthetize her, that Zoe reached up and licked her on the face! She had a fan club by the time I picked her up 5 hours later.
Below is just the heading and opening paragraph of a post by M. Oniker that gives voice to exactly how I and many of my friends have been feeling. She gives a link to an article she is responding to, but if you follow it, please come back to this page and click on the link below it to read the rest of her essay.
Undertow
Dreams conflate reality, making it surreal—
blend present, past and future until they all congeal.
Therein we twist reality into a tangled fray
that’s lived at night but vanishes in the light of day.
We blunder through their memory, half knowing what is real,
trying to sort out whether we know or sense or feel.
If we could just replay them like a picture show,
we might bring to the surface their mysterious undertow.
Prompts today are: only, twist, blunder, vanish and conflate.
Grandpa’s Solo Visits
It’s mysterious how the volume of our cereal goes down
whenever Grandpa chooses to visit in our town.
Without Grandma’s influence, his willpower is zilch
and so he takes this opportunity to filch
our Coco Puffs and Captain Crunch and other cereal,
for he likes a little crackling in his morning meal
along with all the sugar, ‘cuz he swears it puts some zip
in his faltering “get-along” and soothes his aching hip.
None of us tell Grandma, because once he has his fill,
when we all go out for ice cream, Grandpa picks up the bill!!!!
Prompts today are: volume, cereal, mysterious, filch, influence and crackling. Before you ask, this is pure fiction. Sadly, I never had a grandpa. They both died before I was born. If I’d had one, though, I wish he’d been like this grandpa.
Kangaroo Coup
I scored a knockout in Kentucky against a kangaroo.
Before he aimed his kick at me, I simply staged a coup.
I could have killed with kindness, but I chose not to do it
because I knew that if I did, I’d very likely rue it.
For A Letter A Week: The Letter “K”
Image by Graham Holshausen on Unsplash.
Place – kentucky
Emotion – kindness
Adjective – knockout
Verb – kick
My animal – kangaroo
Human History
Our thirst for sharing stories is natural as breath.
It comes to us with our first words and only leaves with death.
That space that holds the stars apart is present in our hearts
and that is where our need to share our stories really starts.
Those common roots that bind us, those roads our footsteps share
compel us to reveal what otherwise we would not dare.
Those tales we feign divide us. True ones create a chain
where we are linked together in victory and pain
as we tell our stories that run together to
reveal the whole history of the human zoo.
Prompt words today are: thirst roots feign roads chain share stories run breath stars apart first for Wordle 556, The Sunday Whirl
All photos except for the photo of Prairie Moths were downloaded from Unsplash.
