Category Archives: Poem

Foxtail

14 Replies

Foxtail

We live in a modular world, things changing around us so fast that what we once thought we’d always remember can pass in a blur. We come together and we part, now close, now remote, castoff too fast to really memorize each other so that years later, we half-remember by a certain picture in the mind, a passing scent, a strain of music.  Something. There was something special. Half-grasped, caught like a foxtail in our mind.

Prompt words are castoff, together, modular, blur and remote. Image by Emmy M on Unsplash.

Random Orders

15 Replies

Random Orders

When our builder said that “It’s terribly good“
as he showed us the shipment of rainforest wood,
I, for one, uttered a silent scream,
for how could I okay this endangered beam?

In like manner, when he presented the door
of yew, it elicited a quiet roar.
So instead, he then showed us a genuine fake—
some laminate made for ecology’s sake

out of plastic and sawdust fused by black light.
Okay, I’m confused. Is night day and day night?
When we asked him for details and asked him to give
us a price for this place we were hoping to live,

he gave us one total, then he gave us a few.
An exact estimate seemed the best he could do.
As if, in his string of incessant banality,
all he could offer was ultimate reality.

my husband and I are both loyal opponents
of phrases with contradictory components.
So his exact estimate clearly confused.
It was plain that the language was being abused.

When our sawyer tried selling us a smaller half
of a board for our wall shelf, I gave a small laugh.
with passive aggression, I played the wise fool.
Was this our only choice? For this was not cool.

At first just amused, in the end we were sad,
for these oxymorons were driving us mad.
Surely these word games were only a fad.
Kids in cliques may mean good when they say it is bad,

but we were adults here and now on the brink
of retiring somewhere to have a stiff drink.
A close distance away was a favorite bar
with a mean martini served in a jar.

We gave random orders for olives and gin,
telling the barkeep what shape we were in.
Then, heads swimming with opposites, we didn’t scrimp.
We told the waiter to bring jumbo shrimp!

Word prompts today are sawyer, clique, oxymoron, fad and give. In case it wasn’t obvious, I took the prompt word “oxymoron” to excess. All of the highlighted words are oxymorons (self-contradictory phrases.)

Act Three

22 Replies

Act Three

The echo of your footsteps as you trod across my mind
creates anticipation of a nostalgic kind.

You elevate my consciousness as you were wont to do
and so in time I manifest the whole grand rest of you.

You’ve been a silent tenant for so many years
that this surprise appearance prompts again those  tears

I thought had been dried up in me when you had to go
to that place where you were drawn by the undertow.

For only a brief moment, we are as we have been, 
’til with a click of memory, I banish you again.

You slip back into shadow in the attic of my mind,
where both of us lie tangled, hopelessly entwined.

I come back to the present while you’re banished to the past,
once again resuming the roles in which we’re cast.

You imprisoned in act two, caught eternally
while I assume a solo role, living out act three.

Prompt words today are elevate, echo, click, tenant and cross.

Junkyard

10 Replies

Junkyard

It is a graveyard for lost toys
abandoned by their girls and boys—
objects of fun once ordinary,
spurned by children who are wary
of things on which to soar and slide,
of toys that draw a kid outside.

Once solely meant for entertainment,
they’re now fenced in for their containment
away from children set aside,
away from things to climb or ride
with other kids bare-faced, unmasked.
Now all are differently tasked.

Now housebound children stare at screens
or sit leafing through magazines.
Monkey bars, it is official,
turned into things more beneficial:
fences, barricades or bars
marking parking spots for cars.

But teeter-totters, slides and swings—
a community of cast-off things—
lie here abandoned in a place
that’s never seen a child’s face.
It is a junkyard overgrown
of pleasures that now go unknown.

The raucous crew for which they’re cast
has become a memory of the past.
Hordes of kids on jungle gyms
pursuing their communal whims
are things that they barely remember.
Leaf piles jumped on in September

neatly raked up in their heaps
are safe from children’s messy leaps.
Every child kept in their room,
the world outside would seal their doom.
So, junkyards filled with these diversions
are museums for today’s aversions.

One by one, the kids grow older
never getting one bit bolder.
Contained inside their separate lives,
Single cells replace their hives.
While hidden from this lonely crew
are all the things we used to do.

Remember when the school bell rang?
Kit and caboodle, the whole gang
would rush to see who got the swings.
What nostalgia their memory brings.
I remember them so well,
but especially the carousel.

Prompts for today are carousel, kit, ordinary, solely and community.

 

 

Fixer-Upper

11 Replies

Fixer-Upper

I am a fixer-upper. My joints are caving in.
My parts are getting even with a long life lived in sin.
Way too many hamburgers, fries and Hershey bars.
Too little time spent jogging — too much time spent in cars.
The fact I’ve been degraded, I admit is not disputable,
for since my early teens my shape has been too often mutable.

I tried to stage a victory over this decline
sometime in my thirties, but somewhere down the line
my resolve grew weaker and I gave up on pilates.
It was too degrading competing with the hotties 
who clinched their little derrieres and flexed their perfect arms.
I simply could not stand the comparison of charms.

I’ll never flip this body. I can’t touch neck to heel.
How can I execute “down dog” when I can barely kneel?
In spite of diligent efforts now and then throughout my life,
with starts and futile endings my biography is rife,
I came up with excuses, I “hee”d and “haw”ed and “hem”med.
Then finally had to admit, this property is condemned!

 

Prompts today are fixer-upper, diligent, victory, mutable and degraded. Photo by Basil Anas on Unsplash, used with permission.

Country Boy

11 Replies


Country Boy
Hair wild as a hedgehog, my kid brother Benny
spins over the landscape just like a lost penny.
Brown as a gingersnap baked by the sun,
he cannot be stopped ‘til he wants to be done.
No iced tea can lure him, for he’d rather sip
from a cold rushing river and then take a dip,
roll in the tall grass until he is dry,
then turn on his back to look up at the sky
at eagles and swallows and dragonfly wings
and flop over again to watch earthier things.
No hearthstone can rival the lure of outside.
He will jump on his pony and take a long ride
to fill up his day with natural pleasures,
stuffing his saddlebag with priceless treasures––
arrowheads, fossils and bottles whose glass
has turned purple from years in the sun and the grass.
Who can explain a country boy’s mind?
Such pleasures cannot be explained or defined.
Just leave him alone, for there’ll be time enough
to smooth all those edges the world may call rough.
For now, he’s a nature boy, unique and wild,
giving birth to the man that will grow from the child.

 

Christine Goodnough sent me the above prompt words and since I’m incapable of turning down a challenge, this was the result. The poem didn’t start out being about my dad but somewhere in the middle, I realized perhaps it was. This is a photo of him at age 13 on the homestead that he grew up on. He moved into town when he married my mom, but farmed and ranched the homestead plus land he later acquired until he sold the ranch after I graduated from high school.

 

 

 

All That Glitters

7 Replies

All That Glitters

Be mindful of your wishes lest fate should smite thee down.
What you think might bring a smile sometimes brings a frown.

Nowhere is it written happiness can be bought.
Too often excess riches are a trap wherein we’re caught.

Sometimes pristine palaces can turn into a cage
for those who sell contentment for a daily wage.

If fairy stories are the tales on which your hopes you gauge,
remember that their characters are prisoners of the page.

Those in ivory towers far above the earth
may not smell the flowers or recognize their dearth.

It’s one thing to be hungry, ill-provided for and flustered,
but once you have enough and your daily needs are mustered,

if you want to win the game of life, be sure to share the ball.
Just relax. Enjoy your life. You do not need it all.

Prompt words today are mindful, smite, pristine, fluster and nowhere.
Image by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash, used with permission.

Cherry Summers

25 Replies


Cherry Summers

They sit on the steps of our low front porch,
cherry-stained fingers dropping pits 
onto the grass or sidewalk.
“They is good but they is sowie,”
exclaims our tiny neighbor, looking up
at my dad, who sits with her and her brothers,
his mouth, too, full of sour cherries
pulled from the trees in our back yard.

My sister and I spend summer afternoons
picking off stems and squeezing
the fruit to expel the pits,
juice running down our arms
to drip off elbows and pool on the 
table, attracting ants.

Bowlful after bowlful is removed from the table
by my mom to make into pies to freeze.
This task of summer is rewarded all winter long
by the crisp thin crust and tapioca-thickened 
ooze of sugared cherry gel surrounding 
the  fruit sweetened by some chemistry
of my mother’s hand.

Those summer days were lengthened
by the absence of the tolling school bell across the street
and by  a sun that lingered into night, 
bedtimes stretching out because of the impossibility
of going to bed before dark.

“Ollie ollie oxen free,” echoed from
games of hide-and-seek that ranged
from the playground across the street
into our backyard where cherry trees
that offered shade in the heat,
offered shelter from detection at night.

The aroma of cherry pie, fresh from the oven,
whetted more than mere appetites
during all those nights when,
snow piled on the windowsills,
we bit into
the sweet memories
of summer

 

 

For dVerse Poets
Image by Joanna Kasinska on Unsplash, used with permission.

The Assistant

9 Replies

The Assistant

When they gush over him, it drives me berserk.
He gathers the praise while I do all the work.

He blissfully gathers the laurels they strew
not once giving credit where credit is due.

When they think of his death, they find the thought numbing.
They think with his end no more genius is coming.

Imagine the shock that will light up their eyes
when the ideas keep coming, much to their surprise,

and they finally learn that the ideas were mine.
When his sun finally sets will be my turn to shine!

 

Prompts today are bliss, berserk, gush, laurels and death.

Opposites Attract.

4 Replies

Opposites Attract

They had a transitory friendship.  In class, it was effusive,
but once out of the classroom it tended toward abusive.
Teachers provided discipline that they lacked otherwise.
They needed supervision to deal with the surprise
they felt when their thoughts differed—to control their yin and yang.
Somehow, self-moderation simply was not their “thang.”
Differences enrich us. They expand our point of view.
They teach us how to listen while buffering the “you.”
Show our differences and likenesses with the ultimate end
of taking an acquaintance and making them a friend.

 

Prompts for today are friend, transitory, effusive and classroom.