Category Archives: Poem

A Day at the Beach: The Sunday Whirl, 509

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A Day at the Beach

My hairdo is unraveling in the ocean’s spray,
and the men are talking fishing so I haven’t much to say.
I do not know their language and the sea breeze makes me cough.
My skin’s at risk in sunlight, but a stone-throw’s distance off,
in the shelter of a palm tree, I find shade, at least,
open up my backpack and partake in a small feast.

Then after I have eaten, when the sun has reached the rim
of the far horizon, I finally have a swim.
For once the sun’s not flaming, it creates a lovely glow,
sinking toward the ocean and vanishing below.
The sea has pleased the fishermen all day, cast after cast,
but as the sun sinks into it, it’s pleasing me, at last.

 

This week’s Wordle words are language, eat, feast, fish, unraveling, spray, shadow, flame, stone, risk and off.

 

 

 

 

Difference of Opinion

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Difference of Opinion

If I were being altruistic, I’d meet you halfway there,
but your overbearing manner is more than I can bear.
You have me in a dither and so it’s true, I fear,
that it’s the end of our discussion, because I am out of here!

 

Prompts today are halfway, altruistic, dither and fear.

Good Dog

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Good Dog

Before they strapped a chain link trinket around his coal black throat,
a hundred loving strokes a day smoothed his black fur coat.
He had a special diet stacked neatly on a shelf,
and though it was placed low enough for him to reach himself,
he never helped himself to it, and right up to this writing,
I never heard one word of his barking or his biting.
A paragon of virtue, he expelled no doggie farts,
and though his nose was yearning to explore some private parts,
he kept it strictly to himself, polite without a lapse,
and came running with his flouncy gait to whistles or to claps.
In short, he was the perfect dog—sleek and trim and dark,
so when his master took him running in the park,
he always got a special treat in his own private cup,
and to reward his human, he lapped the whole thing up!


I photographed this good boy in the park in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I went with my friend Marti, and since I am a good girl, I lapped up a cup of chocolate and salted caramel ice cream myself as well!

Prompt words today are expel, trinket, self, flounce and writing.

Ephemera

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Ephemera

Time drips off its pendulum from three to four to five,
trickling off the minutes that we’ve been alive.
Vapid little seconds are flung off with each tick,
hardly ever noticed as  their passing is so quick.

The richest man on earth cannot buy more than he’s accorded.
Hours can’t be put in storage and so they can’t be hoarded.
Days can’t be the building blocks of a fine estate,
for they are just chalk marks wiped daily off our slate.

 

Prompt words today are trickle, pendulum, storage, vapid and estate. Illustration: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.

Catnap

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Catnap

I’m in the tidepool of repose, floating on my dream—
Hushed and very far away from exhaustion’s scream.
The telephone’s not ringing, I have nowhere to go
except to float in currents of my dreaming’s flow.
All my finicky habits stream out ahead of me
and vanish in the currents, to leave me calm and free.
My head falls to the chair back, waking me from my nap,
but as if to calm me, the cat jumps in my lap.
I fall in with his plans for me, do not avoid his scheming,
but as I gently stroke him, I fall back to my dreaming.

 

Prompt words today are tidepool, repose, telephone, finicky and exhaustion.

Somehow, Things Just Seem to Work Out

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Somehow, Things Just Seem to Work Out

Sometimes the world’s a slippery slope as though it seeks to best us—
its calumnies and trials just meant to try to test us.
But I have found the hard knocks that seem about to break us
are really just the tempering by means of which life makes us.

Life at its extremities of temperature and weather
tests our very limits and makes us stronger whether
the regions where we find ourselves be boiling hot or frigid ones,
cooling off our hot spots and warming up our rigid ones.

When we are exhausted, life has a way of slowing,
as though it has known all along the direction we’ve been going.
Although we meet with floods and gales, there is a sort of knowing
that’s somehow able to predict the way our winds are blowing.

 

Prompt words today are calumny, slope, exhausted, extremity and region.

Yesterday’s Cars

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Yesterday’s Cars

Yesterday’s cars slanted down where they should
have had fins at the tail, and were square at the hood.
Some required a stepstool to enter the door,
then had a big bump centered there in the floor

The grandfathers of cars weren’t for the faint-hearted.
They required you crank them before they got  started,
and inevitably, when the tires went flat,
a service station wasn’t where you were at.

With no Triple A, the onus was on you
to figure out what you had to do.
The jacks were all manual. Tubes needed air,
so many the driver gave up in despair.

With Mom in the front seat and kids in the rumble,
dad  would pump and unscrew and blather and bumble,
then put out his thumb to beg for a ride
in a car that was passing that had room inside.

He was not feinting his look of distress,
and neither was mom, although I confess
it was an adventure for sister and me
who watched the procedure giggling with glee

as inevitably, he would hoof it to town
and we’d open the car doors, jump happily down
and cavort in a field, searching out hidden treasure
and picking up cockleburs in equal measure.

Then when dad caught a ride back with a fixed wheel,
we’d drive on to a diner for a well-deserved meal,
then be on our way, trouble-free and much faster
for the rest of our trip that was free from disaster.

 

And HERE are another two special photos of Model A’s you won’t want to miss.

Prompt words today are yesterday’s cars, slope, require, feint and inevitable. Image by Philip Schroeder on Unsplash. 

I must admit that this particular situation is fiction, although the predicament certainly must have been reenacted many times in an era earlier than mine.

Withholding with One Hand and Giving with Another

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Withholding with One Hand and Giving with Another

She feared that too much dieting would make her moribund,
and so she kept on dining until she was rotund.
She viewed dieting with horror yet felt terror when she viewed
her own form in the mirror, be it fully–clothed or nude.
Of all those excess curves and rolls, she wanted to be free.
Her rosy cheeks were garish, and she willed them not to be.
Yet her psychology of wishing misplaced not a single ounce.
She shed no flesh or inches, lost not one single bounce.

Until she fell in love one day and grew over-excited
when her amorous feelings led to passions unrequited.
And so she lost her taste for food and other worldly pleasures,
this lovelorn depression supplanting former measures
of trying to lose inches around her thighs and trunk,
and so her mass diminished as she slowly shrunk
from size eighteen to fifteen and eventually ten
and that girl in the mirror turned willowly and thin.

Men started to walk by her house and one man chose to linger,
and within the year there was a gold band on her finger.
Thus did she learn the lesson that our wishes might be met
by simply being deprived of what we want to get.
Sometimes deprivation triggers something we need more,
for we do not always know what life may have in store
when it withholds its blessings. It may be that when we wait,
exactly what we’ve wanted is dished out to us by fate!

 

Prompt words today are free, garish, terror, horror, rotund and psychology.

Human Drama

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Human Drama

The wings of destiny are stilled, waiting for our play.
Astonished at our slowness, confused at the delay.
Disappointment in mankind by now’s a usual thing.
What new human horror will the future bring?

We’ve poisoned oceans, sullied air and burdened earth with junk.
Enough to put Ma Nature in a perpetual funk.
She balks and sends out warriors to try to curb our lusts,
but still mankind continues to turn shouldn’ts into musts.

She now sees she was misguided in creating human fools,
with all  of their excesses flaunting all her rules.
Soon she’ll find another way to try to clear her slate of them
as destiny stands waiting to see what is the fate of them.

 

Prompt words today are disappointment, astonish, delay, destiny and wing,

Miser

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Miser

Money was his nemesis. He rued its silvery glow.
The piles of it below his bed had nowhere else to go.
For although he was a hoarder, always craving more of it,
his life was not made better even by just a bit.

His clothes were all in tatters. His house was falling down.
He had outstanding debts and bills in every store in town.
Not one thing about him suggested his success.
Every single outward sign only signaled distress.

He lived his life in misery. Inadequate. Alone.
Miserly and miserable, life stripped to the bone.
But when he finally passed away, his name slipped into lore.
He was the man who wasted life simply by wanting more.

Prompt words today are nemesis, inadequate, silvery, while and signal.