Category Archives: Judy Dykstra-Brown poems

Foggy Weather

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Foggy Weather

For weeks I’ve been suspended in clouds and foggy weather.
Up here on the mountain, I can’t determine whether
there’s another world out there or if I am alone,
banished for a life of sins for which I must atone.
I don’t believe in Purgatory. Don’t believe in Hell
or other childhood stories that grownups chose to tell.
Yet something living in the mist has seeped out into me.
Suddenly I’m restless. I’m not content to be.
There’s something still left in the world although I don’t know what.
What I’ve thought of as security is suddenly a rut.
I haven’t lived my life out. There’s much that I have missed.
I’m needing much more laughter. I’m needing to be kissed.
As soon as this fog lifts away and full light reappears,
I’ll solve all my confusions. I’ll sweep away my fears.
The road will be much clearer when it isn’t half-obscured.
I’ll see the bait that life has set and let myself be lured.

The prompt today was foggy.

Appetite

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Appetite

It is the appetite we wrap our skin around like clothes—
that we push down but that squeezes out around us
in spite of our best efforts—
that appetite we run from and run to.

It lies waiting for us
behind the cold glass windows of stores,
coils in our cooking pots
and curls out in their steam.

Appetite sits under the Christmas tree
wrapped up in red paper and green ribbon.
It is the appetite of the Barbie Doll and the erector set,
the jigsaw puzzle and the bouncing ball of the jacks game.

It is the appetite
that lies dormant in our gonads,
jumps in our semen,
sleeps in an egg.

It vibrates in a vocal cord,
trembles on the fingers of a lover,
swims on the tongue of a nursing infant,
catapults off the slingshot of a seven-year-old boy.

Appetite kinks out from the curling iron,
chews itself from the tips of our fingernails
and spins itself from our feet
during a jungle rhythm or a southern reel.

Appetite pipes from the end of a flute
and shakes off the edges of a tambourine.
It is sealed in a tube of paint,
carried by a brush to the canvas where it dances its own dance.

It is appetite that hides in our computer keys
and in the tips of the fingers that tap them,
appetites lined up on our paper
where we have assembled them in unaccustomed order.

They are what bring us here,
these appetites that can never be catalogued or collected in their entirety—
our appetites better presented in a brown paper bag,
jumbled like penny candies, tumbled over each other like in a junk drawer.

Appetites that can never fully be defined
or neatly wrapped up in a moral or a surprise ending.
Appetites that can never be satisfied,
because our appetites want everything,

and gaining everything, reach out for more.

 

The prompt today is dormant. The prompt word today brought something up in me that has lain dormant for many years.  That is, this poem which was actually written in a MUCH longer form twenty-five years ago. “. . .that lies dormant in our gonads” kept running through my mind, and although I knew I had written it, I couldn’t remember where.  Finally, I did a search in my poetry file and found this poem. The original I submitted to a national poetry competition and won first prize for.  The judge said it was for my pure audacity in submitting a poem that took 12 minutes to read!  I published it in a shorter form two years ago in my blog, but even that tightened poem was probably too long for most viewers to read. At any rate, here it is in its newest and shortest form–a poem from within a poem, where it has lain dormant for twenty-five years.

Prattle Practice

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DSC09337Whenever my older sister’s friend Karen came over to spend the night with her, she’d bring her Bonnie Braids doll to sleep with me.  It kept me out of their hair and gave me someone to talk to.  Perhaps it established a precedent? When I went to visit her in Minneapolis 60 years later, she still had Bonnie.  Here, we reminisce. She still lets me do all the talking.

Prattle Practice

I don’t have any roommates since I lost my spouse,
so I chew the fat with animals and objects in my house.
“How did you get way over there?” I mumble to a spoon.
I converse with my potted plants, complete with off-key tune.
Sometimes I jolt myself awake, talking in my dreams.
What I have to say at least I want to hear, it seems.
I’ve had a conversation with the sidewalk, face-to-face.
I’ll have another talk with it once they remove this brace.

I hold my kittens in a trance by talking in their ears,
and though they do not answer in the manner of my peers,
they have their personal language of meows and purrs and squeaks.
While I speak back in high-pitched tones like baby talk for freaks!
I hope the neighbors have not heard as I advise the trees
 to only shed their debris on their own lawns, if they please. 
I sometimes gripe to flowers that they are too soon dying
and to potatoes in the pan that are too slowly frying.

I grumble to my router and cold water from the tap.
Soundly, I upbraid them in my own domestic rap.
I talk to nestlings from below as they cheep from their nest,
but, dive-bombed by the mother bird, I give our chat a rest.
When I prattle to the furniture, the cook pots and the cactus
in lieu of human company, in fact it is just practice.
All my other blatherings just keep me there on track
for when I meet with human folks who no doubt will talk back!

 

Don’t know where else this photo of the Bonnie/Judy reunion would ever fit in so here it goes into fun photos, along with the poem I wrote to go with it.

Tailor of Mankind

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     IMG_7739Doll by Judy jdb photo

            Tailor of Mankind

    He thought he would be a tailor of men.
 Then, “Woman!” he thought,
  laughing as he
      extracted a rib, seaming

hills and valleys, taking a subtle tuck
     here, folding an excessive curve there
and there. Smoothing it over, shortening
          a length. Extending another.

      Making them fit and not fit.
  Not a perfect pair but rather
thesis and antithesis,
yin
   and
yang.
   Anima
           and
  Animus
     he shaped into each
               in different quantities.

                    Then, he clothed perfection,
       sheathing it and obscuring
  differences to be discovered
    under falling leaves, in darkness,
          setting a whole world in motion.
                           Then he wept.

The prompt today is tailor.

Silly Words

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Silly Words

Bumbershoots and pollywogs, gorp and whirlybird—
Why are the words we choose to coin sometimes so absurd?

Why does one word sound sillier than others we might use?
Why are some sounds more serious while others just amuse?

Why do some get tummy ache blocking their digestion,
while others simply get the flu? It is a puzzling question.

One names the problem. That is all. No words that might confuse.
Whereas the other says the same in words that might defuse

the worry that plain words might cause–a silly sort of way it
is possible to ease the news by the way we say it.

So if the day dawns cold and drear, don coats and scarves and boots
and if dark clouds float overhead, grab your bumbershoots.

Umbrellas block the rain out and keep your shoulders dry,
but bumbershoots are bound to add a sparkle to your eye.

 

The prompt word today is bumble.

Birds of a Feather

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poem


Birds of a Feather

Tossed about in the storm—the tidepools and the heather.
Cast adrift in the air like a tattered feather.
Blown wherever fate decrees, determined by the weather.
One surrenders all control when they are without tether.
Blown up to the highest points, then dropped to the nether.
Never knowing what comes next. Never knowing whether
somewhere there’s another soul, skin weathered into leather
to furnish some protection once we have flocked together.

The prompt today is tether.

I Hear the Distant Music

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I Hear the Distant Music

The midnight bells toll languidly—their sequence slightly varied
to tell the stories of the hours—or those soon to be buried.
Behind them swells the music of a local band.
On the platform in the plaza, for hours more they’ll stand
pumping out their music to the crowds who gather there.
After their days of heavy labor, these hours are without care.

The oom pah pah of distant music stirs my curtains like the wind—
the notes, first stiffly marching, change their minds to dip and bend.
The banda tunes a bit off-key, loud in their origin,
by the time they lift to me are strained out soft and thin.
Living miles above the town, I’m spared soreness of ears
as from assonant cacophony, the music shifts its gears.

What I hear is joyfulness far into the night.
The music meant to call to action releases its bite
and becomes a happy background as I slip into dreams.
Others have not given up on the day it seems.
Behind my lids I see them–lovers in their clenches,
grandmothers slowly nodding as they watch them from the benches.

It may be that daylight hours are for labor and for strife,
but far into the the morning hours, the village lives its life
in the night-shadowed plaza, far below where I
shift upon my pillow, content to simply lie
listening to the village—all the stories that it tells.
The laughter and the music and the tolling of the bells.

(In Mexico, church bells are a sort of village clock.  They toll the hour, half-hour and quarter-hour, but also announce church services and deaths.)

Today’s word was “distant.”

Deep Voice

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Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown, jdb photo

 

Deep Voice

How do the lessons go when the student is the teacher, too?
That deep self writes clues in poetry
using a dream world to reveal the truths of day.

I trace its verity around my mind—
a well-known pattern
that has worn a groove I can’t escape.

Still hoping for a new ending, I pace the same old trail.
They are a fantasy, my hopes,
I must be taught the facts in Braille.

 

 

 

The prompt word today was trace.

Afloat

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Afloat

A hand releases mooring lines and I go floating free.
Unmoored and unamóred, I float upon the sea.
Each time I find a tether, it lets loose of me,
for nature seems to be at odds with propinquity.

Nothing lasts forever or even long enough.
Each time the tattered sleeve of time shakes me off its cuff,
I am again amazed that the rules won’t change for me.
Each time I am newly surprised by mortality.

So many friends and lovers, so many family members
who once were bonfires in my life, flicker down to embers
then fade to ashes in a jar sitting on a shelf.
and once again my tether becomes only my self.

It is a cruel truth of life, this ephemerality
that severs every hawser as ones we love go free.
No matter what allegiance, what solidarity
is promised, still the vow that lasts is mutability.

 

The prompt today is “unmoored.”

If I Follow the Wandering Poet

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If I Follow the Wandering Poet

Who cares
if I swim naked in my pool?
All other human occupants
have left this neighborhood behind,
leaving more room
for possums, skunks,
birds, scorpions, spiders
and me.

I keep a closer company with them
than I do with any human these days.
This week, I talk to the large caterpillar
who seems to sprout two crystals from his crown
as he sits for a day on the Olmec head
that guards my swimming pool.

Back and forth, back and forth I pass,
adding a look at him to my lap routine.
For one long afternoon,
he sits still—like Alice’s caterpillar,
but hookah-less,
meditating in this grey place.

If he were on my Virginia Creeper,
I’d be repositioning him
to the empty lot next door, but here
he seems to be a guest; and so some etiquette
keeps me from altering his placement
as he sits on stone, moving his suction cups in sequence
now and then only to alter his direction, not his territory.

Perhaps I’ve stayed too long
in this one place.
That wandering poet within me
may have somewhere it thinks I need to go.
If it creates a good alternative, 
I might follow in much the same way
that I have come to this point
in my poem.
Blindly, in a maze of words,
open to what comes next.

The prompt word today was “maze.” This is an extensive rewrite of a poem written three years ago.