I just discovered this blog, “Sea Dreams and Time Machines” by Meg Winikates and so far I love everything I’ve read. This piece echoes my sentiments exactly: https://mwinikates.com/2024/11/07/a-billion-brilliant-stars/
And here are two poems I love as well:
and one more poem by the same person.
https://mwinikates.com/2024/10/29/halloweensie-contest-entry/
Hope you enjoy her writing as much as I have.
For Cee’s FOTD
It’s never too late to experience growing pains. If it is our onus in life to grow and to change, with no cutoff point after which we are absolved of this duty, then why are we dumbfounded when those pains of adolescence occur again and again at each stage of life? We perhaps grow more serious over the years, but need we become less sensitized? Does the snub, the willful wounding, the being overlooked, the derision become less important? If so, why? Perhaps it is a mark of self-worth, and that is good, but if it is merely the building of a cocoon around ourselves, except in the direst of circumstances, it becomes more of a punishment than a defense.
We are born into this world to experience and therefore, are given defenses to deal with the negative, but when those defenses grow to isolate us, then they become more than protective blankets. They become walls which become our prisons. We were meant to experience and to be vulnerable to changes. And lest we atrophy, from the cradle to the crematorium, we need to fight to keep ourselves open to those experiences that invite change.
For MVB the prompt is “Dumfounded.”
I wrote this advice to myself four years ago on my birthday, but decided to remind myself again of its message.
Thanks to Georgia for passing on this incredible video!!!
Your Life’s a Journey
If you feel that life’s a game—
pictures leaping from the frame,
its lyrics just a canned refrain,
events linked like a preformed chain.
If what you do seems like a dream,
your actions not what they may seem.
If you find yourself receding
where you’d prefer that you were leading.
If you’re forced into a space
where you seem to vanish without a trace,
just reach out and touch the screen.
Apply your shoulder. Push and lean.
Break out from where you feel you’re trapped.
Rip up the course that fate has mapped.
Shed its pattern. Jump off its shelf.
Live a life you’ve planned yourself.
Your life’s a journey you’re mean to plan
and if you try, I know you can.
Walk the road of your own choosing.
Any other way is losing.
Prompt words for Wordle this week are: chain, lean, game, screen, seem, recede, space, frame, dream, lead, shed, refrain.
First to the Gate
If you were born to innovate,
your one desire to create,
take care you don’t equivocate,
for if you do, I fear your fate
will be that you react too late.
Someone will beat you to the plate!
So if you don’t desire this fate,
Act boldly, friend, and do not wait!!!
The Daily Addictions prompt is innovate.
“A black object is black because it’s absorbing all the light; it’s not reflecting any color.”
Black as His Soul
Black as the soul of POTUS, dark as Beelzebub.
As sable as the darkest night, tarred as an axle hub.
It does not serve you well, my dear, to fall in love with black.
It draws your whole light into it and gives you nothing back.
Black will draw and quarter you, stretch you on the rack.
It is the shade of Mack the Knife, a ripper known as Jack.
There’s no good connotation for this tone of night.
You simply cannot find one—try howe’er you might.
Black robs you of your light and keeps it as its own.
It is a cruel jailer, sitting on its thrown.
Who would guess so many could be so misguided
as to elect a president who is so ill-betided?
What an ugly irony that he who decries colored skin
should have a soul whose pigment takes all color in.
No matter how you’re drawn to it, please take a different tack,
for no matter what you do, black doesn’t love you back.
The prompt today is black.
Outspoken
When you tell your truths en masse,
what you may choose to see as brass
others might perceive as crass.
You may think you’re just a truthful lassie,
but what to you is cute and sassy,
the rest of us consider gassy!
Sometimes, just let the impulse pass.
You’ll be less of a horse’s ass!
The prompt word today was “brassy.”
Rose
We are all filters of the world,
taking the news in—the happy births
and inane deaths, the charities and cruelties,
the beauties and the gross ugliness
of nature and of human nature.
These things pass through us or get stuck,
taking us with them into the poles of our own natures.
Those ills of the world we choose to dwell on
change us if we are not careful to let them go again
or to act in a manner opposite—
which causes us to seed new hope
which just might, just might
catch hold in the sieves
of others
and bloom.
A concrete poem is one that takes the form of what it describes. I could find no photo of a rose in my photo library, so the form of the poem will have to do to illustrate its meaning.
The prompt today was “filter.”
jdbphoto
On the Stump
Hobbling around on the stump of a life,
nobody’s lover and nobody’s wife,
her children and grandchildren all raised and grown,
out of her life and out on their own.
Is her life over? Is it near its ending,
or has she another life that is just pending?
Has she a talent for regeneration?
Is the first sixty years mere education?
A single shoe dropped is only one shoe.
Life isn’t over until it is through.
Perhaps she’s less active removed from the past,
but wind can still fill out a sail at half mast.
The stub of a life can still get us around.
A heart can still beat and the blood can still pound.
Go after adventure for all you are worth,
for every new day is a part of your birth.
The prompt word today was “stump,” and I must admit it nearly stumped me. Lately my poems have degenerated into moralistic little lesson-rhymes. I may seem to be up on the stump, but it it is not my intention to preach as it is mainly myself I’m trying to advise. If you want to listen in, you are most welcome.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 