For this prompt, I’d like to reblog a poem written eight years ago, soon after I started my blog. I actually went back and edited the original, so it is a newer version of itself. HERE is the link
New Walls Can’t Make Good Neighbors
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Category Archives: Poem
Little Jobs
Little Jobs
Why is it that just as I find a time for resting,
I think of another job life seems to be requesting?
Little jobs pursue me, destroying all my fun.
Life comprises all of them until my day is done.
Dogged and determined, I fulfill all of them,
tolerating constant toil, my life filled to the brim.
I am a proper martyr. I toil with little resting.
I have no time for joyful acts like partying and festing.
Tasks that are debilitating to much lesser folks
are to superior ones like me, merely nature’s pokes
to spur me on towards greatness—to glory and to fame.
In the annals of history, you’re sure to see my name.
So thank God for little jobs, for they add up at last
into that great accomplishment within which fame is cast.
Prompt words today are debilitating, dogged, resting, comprise and tolerate. Image by Irena Carpaccio on Unsplash.
Now and Then: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Wordle 537
Now and Then
In cracking the present to reveal the past,
it shimmers, triumphant, expansively vast.
I tend to remember the moments most happy—
successful and positive, silly and sappy,
but when I remember it using a filter,
it leans to one side, completely off-kilter.
The same number of memories from days gone by
if remembered at all, are recalled with a sigh.
I reach into my heart and remember again
the more negative moments of days that have been.
Then I quiver with passions, now full of dejection
of the losses and failures and pains of rejection
It’s the way of the world to give us one day
what in the future it will take away,
but nonetheless, we must live for the present
and accept all it offers—both painful and pleasant.
When we pin all our thoughts on past sadness and fun,
We fasten ourselves to a life that’s undone.
This is my answer to John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”
The Sunday Whir Wordle 537 prompts are: undone cracking triumph expansive reach quiver shimmering filter way reveal sigh moment
Mismatched Hearts
Mismatched Hearts
She overdosed on tinder, declaring it a bomb.
She’s through with OKCupid and over Match.com.
In fourteen introductions, not one has turned out kissable.
If she had to rate them, she’d rate every date as missable.
Not one man she’s been linked to has been skookum, smooth or smart.
Not a single one of them has satisfied her heart.
Fatuous or condescending, under or over-dressed—
each one she has been matched to has left her unimpressed.
No plangent love bells have rung out. No lover has been gettable.
One theme that’s been repetitive is that they’re all forgettable.
Prompt words today are skookum (strong or brave) repetitive, fatuous, plangent and smooth.
Outta Here!
Outta Here!!!
The preponderance of people do not scintillate
when they tell a story wherein they relate
all the various aches and ills of their last operation,
hoping for our sympathy and our cooperation
in asking for each detail about defective parts—
their livers or their hip joints or their kidneys or their hearts.
Of course they know they’ll wow us and turn our knees to jelly
as they relate the drama of the opening of their belly,
never knowing that we’re blocking out all memory of their story
that is boring in recital, though its details may be gory.
All-in-all they need to know they’re in double jeopardy
first of losing bodily organs, and then of losing me!!!
Prompt words today are block, preponderance, jeopardy, scintillate and jelly.
Fun News
Fun News
Litigation is imperative to end this maudlin folly.
We must petition powers that be to make the news more jolly.
Fill it up with cheerful stuff and cover up the crime.
Scrub the whole environment to cover up the grime.
There isn’t any heartache and prejudice is over.
Cover up the poison ivy. Embellish the clover.
Dealing with reality simply isn’t fun,
so let’s whitewash reality until the the world is done.
Reality shows are way more fun than boring old reality.
So let’s cheer up the news again with fictional banality!
Prompt words today are folly, maudlin, petition, imperative and litigation. Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
The Greatest Story Ever Told: Wordle 536
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Join us in the circle that chronicles the blend
of our different stories that lead to just one end.
Our ceiling is the clouds and one wall is the west
and the north and south and east combine to form the rest.
Raven speaks our history that’s written on the sands
of the mighty ocean that touches all the lands,
pounding at their edges with insistent fists
gathering the surfaces that formerly it kissed.
Pulling all the rock slides roughly with its hands,
grinding all the boulders down to powdered sand.
This is one grand story that none of us should miss .
Have you any story more relevant than this?
For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: room cloud any fist raven rock slide speak west story blend circle
Good Humor Rumor
Good Humor Rumor
Chocolate chip is best, but I’m amenable to berry
when we hit the ice cream aisle at the cash and carry.
Afterwards, we’ll both lie low until the carton’s finished,
for if we share our ice cream stash, it is too soon diminished.
But somehow when we’ve paid a visit to the frozen section,
it never seems to escape our neighbor’s keen detection.
Instant company always comes knocking at our door
when we get back home again to where we were before
So if you’re not prone to sharing , I really must advise,
that if you’re bearing ice cream, it’s best done in disguise.
Word prompts today are lie low, restriction, instant, berry. amenable
Fleeced
Fleeced
If you simply must explore
to find the golden fleece of yore,
as have other fools galore,
I fear that its discovery
is something that is not to be
by the likes of you or me.
The point, I fear, is simply moot.
If you are at all astute,
you’ll realize there is no loot.
Your hopes, I know, will surely clash
with the fact there is no cash,
for legends often make us rash.
But I fear I must explain
lives searching for an unearned gain
turn into lives just spent in vain.
And that, in short, is just inane!
Prompt words today are fleece, moot, discovery, galore and clash. Image by Georgi Kalaydzhiev on Unsplash.
Liquid Yolk
Liquid Yolk
He holds the hot egg in one hand, turning it as he taps it gently with the knife edge in a perfect horizontal line, and lifts the top off like a skull cap to reveal the molten golden lava of the half-congealed yolk. It spills out in a river as he moves his spoon around the shell to remove the white in one solid unblemished half-oval—shining, still steaming from the boiling water it has so recently been surrounded by.
The egg rests on the square of toast and is soon joined by its equally perfect other half, mashed
onto the toast to be lightly sprinkled with salt, dusted with black pepper. Then, the final perfect ingredient to this gracefully executed breakfast favorite—one delicate sprinkle of cider vinegar from the tiny stoppered glass vinegar cruet and the neat slicing with fork and knife, the lifting to lips, the dabbing of yolk from the plate with another triangle lifted from the toast plate.
The final smacking of lips and the long satisfied sigh as he places his knife and fork across his empty plate. My father, a large man with work-hardened hands, is like an artisan in his neat and graceful maneuvering of the utensils, his napkin blotting any errant egg from his lips before raising, at last, the coffee cup to his lips to wash it all down.
Soft boiled eggs, toast and coffee. Bright yellow, white and brown are the colors of the morning as the school bell rings and I am off in a mad dash to slide into my seat in my schoolroom across the street before its last peal. This memory of my father eating soft boiled eggs was early morning poetry that I have not forgotten half a century and more later. It is the little things, the small beauties, that stick like liquid yolk to our memories.
For dVerse Poets prompt: food
My father put vinegar on everything from cabbage to eggs. I loved to watch him eat, for it was at the table that he was transformed from a hard-working farmer-rancher with wheat in his pants cuffs to a cultured gentleman with impeccable table manners. In this prose poem I try to replicate my father’s artistry in disassembling a soft-boiled egg. The cruet above is one of the few objects I claimed when I went to pack up our house after my father’s death. I still use it for cider vinegar, and think of my dad every time I open the cupboard and see it on the shelf.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 