I can never remember this word, so I think I am going to have it tattooed on my palm so I can remember my excuse for not remembering!!!!! (In case you don’t read comments, I just received these words of wisdom from my sister, who obviously remembers her Greek mythology better than I do: Lethe was the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. Thanks, Sis!!
Self Portrait
I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have produced
all of the parts of myself I try to rein in.
This has created a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.
For dVerse Poets.
The Excuse
It is those times
over dinner
when we have lifted a glass
or two—
those times
without husbands, who are home
watching a game
or out with gun and skeet—
those times
with long-ago college schemes
or scandals
remembered—
when, although no longer hungry,
we nonetheless order a dessert
with three forks
as an excuse to linger.
For Monday Poetry Prompt, the prompt is “excuse.”
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #89”. Today’s number is 211. To play along, go to your photos file folder and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and post 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. Here are my contributions to the album.
Click on Photos to Enlarge and View as Gallery.
Coco and I celebrated the sunset in the hammock with Bruce’s book, Uncommon Sons.
For JohnBo’s Cellpic Sunday
Since I have written around 4,000 poems for this blog, I have lately started searching to see how many of the prompt words have been used in an earlier poem. I couldn’t resist doing so for “sundae,” thinking this might be the one word I’d never used before, but it actually came up in 4. This is the one I chose:
Sixteen!! The Combiners (Excerpt)
This is an excerpt from a longer narrative poem in my book, Prairie Moths. It is the final section of “The Combiners” –a poem about the itinerant workers who would drive up from Oklahoma each summer to harvest the wheat crop in South Dakota. This infusion of fresh young men into a town of just 700 people was, of course, exciting to teenaged girls whose own male classmates were a bit immature. Not that any of us ever did anything about it. Imagining and talking was enough for us at the age of sixteen!
The Combiners
I saw him first on the bleachers
on the other side of the floor.
As dancers came together and parted,
I saw him and then didn’t see him.
After the music stopped, I craned my neck
around the legs that stood in front of me,
trying to see him across the cleared dance floor.
Then the voice at the top of the legs
asked me to dance, and I looked up–at him.
Feeling uncertain, wicked and wild,
I answered yes.
I’d served him once or twice
at Restaurant 16–
that highway-fronting restaurant
as exotic as its name.
I knew he was working the Weston place
with an outfit my dad had never used.
He liked his steak well-done,
French dressing, no tomatoes.
Butterscotch sundaes made him cough.
Over the water pitcher and order pad,
we had traded a look or two.
I knew he wore Old Spice
and drank Cokes with breakfast,
but I didn’t know his name.
When we got to the dance floor,
he took my hand,
put his other hand on my damp waist.
It was a slow dance and the night was hot.
The dance was work.
I was awkward–too inhibited to get as intimate
as following in dancing requires.
Over the music, we tried to shout our names,
tried to find a mutual rhythm,
finally giving up both endeavors
to dance the slow song, not touching,
moving our arms in fast song 60’s style
to the slow song rhythms.
When the music stopped,
he walked me back again
to the bleacher
he had plucked me from,
reinserted me into the correct space in the line of girls,
smiled, and walked away.
My friends closed around me
like a sensitive plant
to hear the news.
I watched his back,
blue short-sleeved shirt,
his pressed Levis
and his cowboy boots.
I watched the Oklahoma swing of his hips–
danger on the hoof.
He wouldn’t ask me to dance again,
yet, his sun-blackened arms,so finely muscled,
had held me for a minute or two.
His bleached blue eyes
had seen something of worth in me.
He had asked my name, touched my waist,
and walked me off the dance floor.
And, since this was as spicy
as any of our stories would likely be
all summer long,
I turned to my friends to tell the tale.
The Word of the Day prompt is “Sundae.”
When I saw this prompt, I just had to reblog this blog of mine from 2018. It was too perfect.
My friend Larry Kolczak has allowed me to copy this hilarious email sent to me. I’ve been trying to convince him he should have a blog himself. Do you agree?
Six months ago, we hung these beaded curtains on our second-floor patio fence to obscure the view into the neighboring lot. Recently, …
… we started finding broken strands. We figured it was because the curtains weren’t made for outdoor use, and that sun and wind had deteriorated the nylon strings. But, that wasn’t the problem…
It turns out that many of the eco-friendly beads are acorns.
Guess who noticed?
He nips the string to get the uppermost acorn…
… which he either eats on the spot, or buries in our potted plants, and leaves us with the…
…collateral damage.
Go HERE to find Larry’s monthly articles in El Ojo del Lago.
MVB‘s Prompt is Acorn.
image by rohan gangopadhyay on unsplash
September 6, Heather Cox Richardson
Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Over the image, Trump’s social media post read: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The words were followed by three helicopter emojis, symbols the right wing uses to represent former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s goons’ disappearing political opponents by pushing them out of helicopters.
Although it has become trite to speculate about what Republicans would say if a Democratic president engaged in the behavior Trump exhibits daily, this open attack of the president on an American city is a new level of unhinged. Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo wrote: “The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents.” He added, accurately: “In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.” . . .(Go HERE to see more.)
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 