Category Archives: Poem

Patterns Hinted at in Dreams, for dVerse Poets

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Patterns Hinted at in Dreams

I walk down stairs into my sleep
with parts of self I need to keep.
I take them there to other places
of worn out lives, departed faces.
What would these dear ones think of me
if they were given powers to see
into this future where they’ve not gone?
While I have wandered over yon,
they have remained there behind—
away from future’s relentless grind.
Frozen there, they do not judge
or carry with them any grudge.

I am stitched  in every mind
as I was when they were left behind.
So in dreams I show them me
as though they might furnish a key
to how I’m doing now that I’ve changed.
Have I grown better as I’ve ranged
away from who I was back then?
On awakening, I take my pen
and see if I can recall reams
of words extending from my dreams.

All those adventures, all the stories
of hidden rooms and moving lorries,
ghost friends who orchestrate, it seems,
advice for me from within dreams—
kinder friends who try to wrest
the parts from me that they’ve found best.
They are my teachers, born in mist
to guide me while I can’t resist.

One alters out unneeded parts.
Another makes room for the starts
of what I could be, given time.
With innuendo, symbols, mime,
they hint at where to sew each hem
so though I barely recall them
when I awaken, still there’s a sense
that my life has grown more dense.
Just scraps of them go with me so
I have an inkling where to go
next in life. Each word I write
is a little beam of light
that reminds me, as I sew the seams,
of  patterns hinted at in dreams.

The dVerse Poets prompt is dream interpretation.

I can’t help but post this earlier blog as well, even though it is not in poetry form:

Dreaming A Path

Dream, Fri. Oct 18, 2013

We were at a booth in a café. It was a huge room with booths on every side and each booth had a clock, or at least I thought they did. I don’t think I ever looked. Our alarm started going off and there was no way to turn it off. It was by me and I tried and tried but couldn’t get it off. I said I was just going to unplug it, but Patti said perhaps it was timed with all the other clocks at tables and then it wouldn’t match. I said couldn’t they just reset it when we left? Someone agreed, but still we didn’t unplug it and it went on and on and on. Very annoying. Our booth came equipped with a little dog. It was tiny and light with long very curly white hair that was in loose corkscrew very long ringlets. It was so adorable and affectionate. I held it most of the time. It had legs like wires that went straight down..very skinny…and it jumped a lot. When the waitress came, we told her about the alarm and she said yes, she’d noticed that it was going off…but she didn’t do anything about it. We told her how cute the little dog was and she said yes…but then it seemed like it was the little dog who had the alarm that was going off. We ordered and afterwards I was wanting a dessert but thought I shouldn’t order one. Patti was to my right and I suddenly realized she was eating a very rich chocolate dessert—a sort of fudge flan or very moist slippery cake that was hot with a hot fudge sauce over it. She offered me a taste. It was a very small rectangle…not very big…but I tasted it and immediately said I’d have one, too. It was incredible. Still, the alarm went off. It was driving me crazy! Then I woke up and realized it was my own bedside alarm. I reached up with my eyes still closed and tried to turn it off, but couldn’t find the control. Finally I picked it up, opened my eyes and found the control. It was 8:10. The alarm had been going off for 10 minutes!!!!

My interpretation:

I found this dream in a folder on my computer. I have no memory at all of having dreamed it, and perhaps that distance makes it easier for me to interpret it. In a few weeks, I turn 67. For the past year, I’ve thought repeatedly about death and the fact that if I’m lucky, I probably have only 30 years left. For some reason, that awareness is very stressful. I feel a need to finish everything I’ve started and never completed. Earlier, that consisted of a lot of sorting, construction of storage spaces and weeding out of the contents of my house. That effort is ongoing. What also happened, however, is that I have an incredible drive to get everything published that has been lying around in file cabinets for many many years as well as a need to write new work and somehow disseminate it. My blog is part of that effort, as are my efforts to get all my books on Amazon and Kindle.

Seeing this dream as if for the first time, I clearly see that theme of time running out coupled by a sense of alarm that I need to do something about it. The little dog shows the attractive quality (adorable and affectionate) of finally dealing with all these loose ends—(note all his corkscrew hairs). Those wiry little legs that kept him always active certainly reflect the urgency I’ve been feeling to write write write.

One aspect of this awareness in my real life for a time consisted of my fear that I will stop breathing. This often gets me up gasping at night to run outside to try to breathe. For some reason I haven’t had any of these panic attacks since I started writing every morning. What I interpreted as a growing fear of death and a dread of ceasing to exist was perhaps a fear of not living and creating while I am alive.

I think the interplay between my sister Patti and me in the dream reflects a number of things. One is a difference in our approaches to life. I think in a way, she is more of a rule-follower and since she was my immediate pattern for most of my earlier life, I think a part of me feels this same need, but this is coupled with an equal and stronger need to create my own path in a direction unique from my two older and very competent sisters and to break a few rules to do so. At a very early age, much as I admired and imitated my sisters, I felt the need to prove myself. To find something to know that they didn’t already know. I found this route when I started venturing out at an early age to find new ground where they had not gone before me. It led me first into the homes of friends and strangers where I saw life being acted out in a manner entirely different from my own home. The road led further—to summer camp where I was a stranger to all and vice versa. I loved being the stranger. In choosing a college, I fell back on the reliability and comfort of attending the same school my sister had attended, but in my Jr. year I took my first big leap—a trip around the world on World Campus Afloat. That early adventure in seeing dozens of new and strange cultures set my life path. I’ve been traveling ever since and have been living in Mexico for the past 13 years.

I believe this dream depicts the sense of urgency I’ve had my entire life to “do” something with experience. My art and writing allow me to turn off the alarm for the hours in which I practice them. That small dessert might symbolize the rewards of doing what I need to do to do so.

P.S. An interesting insight I have had just as I started to post this: (And, interestingly enough, wordpress will not accept my blog entry. Perhaps it is insisting I add this P.S. before it does so.) I just got back to Mexico from a visit to the states wherein I visited my oldest sister Betty who is now in the depths of the world of Alzheimer’s. While I was there, she seemed increasingly distressed by the fact that she can no longer communicate, but one day as we were sitting in the living room portion of her small apartment in a managed care Alzheimer’s wing, she motioned to the middle of the floor and said, “Look a that cute little white thing there—that fluffy little white dog!” This was the first incidence that I know of of her actually hallucinating visually, and for some reason it popped into my mind in relation to the little dog in my dream. All of these images—of our dreams as well as our daily life—remind us to live while we can and to do what is most important to us. In my case as well as my sister’s—to communicate. Too late for her, although she continues to try. Not too late for me.

P.S.S.  By the way, the instant I completed the above P.S., the wordpress page that had continued to not allow me to post this blog entry flashed the message:  What do you want to post?  Text? Picture?  I chose text and and you have just read it.

Wheel of Seasons for The Sunday Whirl

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Wheel of Seasons

A morning walk in autumn with warm sun overhead
Is something in the winter that you might approach with dread.
With a hood pulled round your head and chin, although the view is nice,
you’re bound to cross a wonderland of frost and snow and ice.
You pull your cape around you from your shoulders to your knees,
hoping three layers of garments with circumvent the freeze.
Saved by the certain knowledge that the great wheel of the year
will in months give rise to springtime as it slips another gear.

Words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 741 are: wonderland bound morning ice knees hope wheel three cape head cross

“Flight” for Ragtag Daily Prompt

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If We Listened to the Birds

If We Listened to the Birds

If I were a mighty bird,
fluent in both voice and word,
when the weather shifted colder,
I’d wing myself to royal shoulder,
have a perch and, I confess,
use all the powers I possess
to loosen up and leave my mark
on that stodgy matriarch,
to feel my presence and touch of wings
and know what necessary things
each creature in nature brings with it.
How each thing comes together to fit.

This I would find exhilarating.
By my presence, educating
the powers-that-be to think of nature
as more than just a nomenclature.
Perhaps I’d tell the president
that I have been heaven sent
to tell the powers that abide
that God’s not really on their side.
God would have us guard our earth
There’s more than money that marks its worth.
All of nature, without a doubt,
makes the world of man work out.

If those large personalities
who run our world would only, please,
take heed of what I have to say,
we’d survive to live another day,
another year, another eon.
We’d have a peaceful planet to be on.
The brother eagle that guides their flight
knows too well extinction’s plight.
The symbol there that marks their seal
is anguished over the ordeal
that fellow creatures of nature face
because of loss of living space.

Our national parks sold off for oil,
waters from which fish recoil,
oceans plugged with plastic waste
we idly cast off in our haste.
While politicians rail and bicker,
our society grows sicker.
Hospitals far out of reach,
schools encouraged not to teach
science, but religious fable
that makes the politicians able
to pull the wool over the eyes
of those who believe their disguise.

It’s true that often what we get
is exactly opposite
of what they promise, their rhetoric
stirring us to moods euphoric
when in fact they’re empty words
meant to bilk admiring herds.
Look deeper at what they profess.
They promise more, but give us less.

The RDP Prompt is “Flight.”

“Harbinger” for Word of the Day Challenge

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Harbinger

Harbinger

If you value winter and if you value spring,
dedicate your efforts to one important thing.
Take it as a harbinger that nearly everything
weather has been telling us seems to have a sting.

Forest fires in summer, winter with more snow.
Spring rains bringing flooding everywhere we go.
Hurricanes with violence beyond the status quo,
It seems that Mother Nature delivers what we sow.

 

The prompt for the Word of the Day Challenge is “important.”

Everything is in the Shape of a Bird, a Fish or a Woman

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Everything is in the Shape of a Bird, a Fish or a Woman

Look how they frown in the old photograph:
my grandmother, her sister,
her two daughters and her granddaughter.   
All of the women are very stern.
Grandma looks out of her element,
her eyes shielded against the sun.

In the yellowing photo,
“Taken at homestead” written on the back,
They stand, stark house behind them.
From the porch overhang, a sparse vine hangs,
but on the hidden tendril of the vine,
in the dead tan prairie that surrounds the scene,
in the summer grass bent low, I imagine birds.

It is a drying photo—brittle, cracked,
of three generations of prairie women.
Although none there knew it,
a waterhole is in their near future,
and in this stock pond that my dad would someday dig,
would swim perch and crappies,
sunfish, northern pike.

And although none there will ever see it,
in my house, everything is in the shape of a bird, a fish or a woman.
On the wall hangs an earthy goddess–
stolid and substantial. 
Birds perch on her shoulder, arm and knee.
On the hearth, a crow formed out of chicken wire.

A soapstone fish swims the window ledge
beside that aging photograph
and on another window ledge
 are two ancient terra cotta figurines.
The small one kneels in her kimono, playing pipes.
The large one stands wide-hipped
with arms narrowing to points
above the elbow.

In my studio,
a still-damp terra cotta figure
holds a fat plum.
On drying canvasses,
Women recline in their vulnerable states–
layers of wet flesh tones, yellows, purplish reds.

The house in the photograph
has been long-felled by rot and fire and rust.
All of the people shown here are now dead.
Yet still in the grass, the meadowlark.
and in the muddy pond the minnow.

In the glass of the photo frame, I see my own reflection–
thinning lips pulled into one straight line.
around me is their house, their sky, their prairie grass.
In the glass, my face
turns into the face of my grandmother.
I flinch but do not falter.
I look deeper.
Reflected in one eye, a perched bird.
in the other eye, a swimming fish.

Esther’s Writing Prompt this week is :Shapes.

Snow’s Epilogue for dVerse Poets

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Snow’s Epilogue

We can’t codify the snowflakes nor put them into order.
They fall to make a blanket or a pile or a border.
They come in a blizzard and leave us in a trickle.
There’s something about former snow that is so very fickle.
It drips in drops from icicles and surges down the gutters.
Our attempts to modify it end in futile mutters.
I need not be prophetic to state the truth of snow.
It starts out in a flurry and ends up in a flow.

 

This poem does not match the beautiful imagery of the poem that inspired the prompt or of those poets who answered it. You can see a link to their poems below.  All I can say for it is that it does record snow’s ending .

The challenge for dVerse Poets is to write about snow.

Canine Church

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Canine Church

Two dogs to my right and one dog o’er my head
As I lie on the edge of my doggie-filled bed.
Now one moves to my legs to anchor me down,
fearing my desertion for kitchen or town,
banishing canines to cushions or yard––
beds they find  chilly and lonely and hard.

Better this bed warmed by blanket and sheet
and a mattress pad heater to thaw out their feet.
A mom they can cuddle or lie on, or heck––
tunnel into her armpit or under her neck.
These Sunday mornings, they insist that Judy’s
meditations with dogs are her spiritual duties.

Crossings for One Word Sunday Challenge

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dscf2023

Crossings

A river between us, each high on a ridge.
If we’re ever to meet, we must build a bridge.
But it’s hard to accomplish unless we take hand
to collect the cement, the gravel and sand.

So those of us tired of  manual labors—
not given to chitchatting much with our neighbors—
can go on our blogs to find our own kind,
constructing bridges purely of mind.

Blogging is great to bring folks together
on separate continents, in any weather.
We can be lazy, me here and you there,
building our bridges with ease, through the air.

“Crossing” is the prompt for One Word Sunday.

For SOCS, “Journeys.”

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“Everyone you meet knows something you don’t know but need to know” –C.G. Jung

Journeys

Every conversation is a quest two people enter
from opposite  directions to converge at its center.
The first part of the journey commences with their greeting—
an intricate endeavor completed with first meeting.

With each new associate, we visit a new land.
With each conversation, our horizons expand
into lands exotic, tragic or entertaining.
Perhaps enemy territory—often with no training.

Do we take umbrage with their words or enter, unprotesting,
the world that they offer—experimenting, testing
new mental mountains, jungles where vivid birds might call,
beckoning us onwards, or do we meet a wall

that offers us no access—sealed up, rigid, cold—
closed to all explorers, nearly obscured with mold?
What journeys do we offer ourselves to those we meet?
Do we offer easy access or promise sure defeat?

Life was designed for journeying. Daily, new vacations.
Some conversations novels and others mere quotations.
Even that experience you wouldn’t choose again
is just another whistle stop on life’s commuter train.

For SOCS the prompt is “A favorite saying.”

Alluring, for RDP

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DSC00089

An Aging Siren’s Lament

I once was alluring, bewitching and busty,
but now I’m decrepit, doddering and fusty,
making mountains of molehills and blocks out of chips
and adding them onto my thighs, calves and hips.

As I fall apart, I become more voluminous,
my eyes less dewy, my skin much less luminous.
I’m developing poorly, my aging less fine
than mellow old cheeses and whiskies and wine.

As my memory fades and becomes much less credible,
I’m less appealing and for sure less beddable.
I’m held together by trusses and braces,
Spanx and Ace bandages, spandex and laces.

Someone should just shoot me. (Botox, not a gun.)
I’d be more beguiling and have much more fun.
But diets are tedious. Shots must be painful.
Of all of these cures, I’m purely disdainful.

I guess I’ll age gracefully, sip from its cup
greedily, admitting I’m giving up.
I’ll simply sit here inert on my fanny
and trade in the title of sexpot for granny!

The RDP prompt today is “Alluring.”