Category Archives: Poem

Inside My Sister’s Mind

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For NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 6, the prompt is: Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely.

The line I chose was “Not all those who wander are lost.” from —The Lord of the Rings by  J.R.R. Tolkein. This is the poem that resulted. The quote in the last line of the poem is from the title character in Hamlet, by Wm. Shakespeare.

                    Inside My Sister’s Mind

In my life, sometimes,
when I was farthest from knowing where I was,
I was the closest to finding myself.

Is this how it is
for those who wander
the countless corridors of dementia?
Do they encounter themselves,
                   again and again,
unstuck from time?

Do our constant attempts to bring them back 
              hamper their journeys,
       start them over again,
frustratingly?

Every road we travel
need not be the same road—straight and chronological.
            Dreams teach us that.
                                           Unstick us.
Put our minds in the clouds to float
          hors d’oeuvres of memory,

                                   a bite           here
                  and a bite           there.

Who are we to try to attempt to force feed an entire meal?

Perhaps dementia is a diet, of sorts, for the mind.
                                             Selecting the most delectable,
                        forsaking the usual progression.

For our whole lives, we stuff ourselves

in a predictable manner,
             from soup to crème brûlée.

Perhaps those lost to us are only lost to us,
    but not themselves.
Perhaps their minds, led by a different palate,
             enjoy a picnic of pick-and-choose,
spread out over a meadow
                on a blanket that obscures
                                        memory
                                             to allow them to enjoy
each morsel
               unclogged
by the memory of the last.

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

 

Noises in the Night

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Noises in the Night

She was six years old and alone in a room that had noises in the wall. She would curl up into a tight little ball under the covers and concentrate on the friendly sounds––the tapping of the pendulum of the clock which hung on the wall beside her bed and the water gurgling through the heating pipes. The muffled voices of her parents down below in the living room. She liked these noises. They made her think that she wasn’t alone.

But she could hear other sounds of the summer night–– the sudden loud popping noise that she thought was a gun until daddy told her that it was only houses settling, or the sound of the elm tree outside her window scraping against the brick on the chimney or the wind as it whined through her screens, making the venetian blinds scrape against their wooden window frames. She could hear things in the walls, too––noises that sounded like people walking and high shrieking noises that daddy said were just mice and not robbers.

The sheet felt muggy on her bare legs and she kicked it off and rolled over. She lay on her stomach and slipped her hand beneath the pillow, sliding it back-and-forth against the trapped coolness of the percale. She glanced at the noisy pendulum clock Santa had brought her for Christmas to help her learn to tell the time. It was her first real clock and it was in the shape of a Shmoo.  She could just make out where its hands were from the light of the streetlamp shining through her window. It wasn’t very late.

She flipped over and slid her legs over the side of the bed, feeling the slight stickiness of the linoleum on her feet as she walked to the window. The air had cooled a bit and it had started to rain. A slight breeze tickled the hairs on her arm and sifted the rain onto her nose as she pressed it close to the screen to smell the mustiness of the wet night grass.

She wondered when her older sisters would get home and come up to bed. It was lonely in a room all alone in the upstairs of a house that had robbers in the walls.

 

For MMM’s Sunday Writing Prompt

Safety in Numbers

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Safety in Numbers

It might beseem the patriarch to forego actions radical,
forsaking them for pastimes more blandly mathematical.
Discourse over Pi and coffee a safer course, by far,
than plotting revolution at a local bar.
That there’s safety in numbers is a much-repeated platitude
much favored over taking risks with a subversive attitude.

Prompt words today are radical, patriarch, beseem and coffee. Image by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash, used with permission.
And for NaPoWriMo, Day 5

Sixteen

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Sixteen

Do you remember when you were unkissed—
dreaming and wondering what you had missed?

Your evenings too tranquil, but you were too scared
to do much about it. You just never dared

to flirt with a guy or call boys on the phone—
too shy to make any advance on your own.

You disparaged those girls who had gone on before you.
You claimed that their exploits did nothing but bore you,

but you knew, really, that they’d won the race
that established you firmly right there in last place.

Not one errant lover had attempted to con you.
No single advance had been foisted upon you.

Alone in this horrid lamentable state,
sweet sixteen and un-kissed was a terrible fate!

Then that night in the summer out under the stars,
when you stood by the roadway between your two cars

and talked for an hour with soft music streaming
from both of your cars, you thought you were dreaming

when finally it happened, and you two were kissing
you finally knew what it was you’d been missing!

 

Word prompts today are tranquil, disparage, kiss, foist and race.

Empty Cities: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 4 Liminal Poem

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Click on images to enlarge.

Empty Cities

The ghosts of hamburgers lurk in the air,
waiting for children no longer there.
All of their voices turned empty and spare,
waiting lines empty and every chair
devoid of bodies. Each table bare.
To where have they gone? Do you know where?
If people all vanished, would the world care?
Would the lynx and the bobcat, the fox and the hare

and deer from the forests and crocodiles dare
to enter our shopping malls and broach the stair
forever silent, frozen and still?
Would they climb the escalator’s metal hill
and move into spaces filled with our things?
Jackets and towels and soup bowls and rings?
Refrigerators, bicycles and shoes,
donuts and bagels and pretzels and booze?

Tip over displays and ponder just what
we ever accomplished with all of this glut?
When we are gone will the animals wonder
what they can do with all of this plunder?
Will they swim in our pools and loll on our greens?
Will they scratch their wild backs on our mowing machines?
Leap over our cars and stream over our bridges,
enter our houses and nose through our fridges?

Will they make a nest of the socialite’s mink?
Have dozens of babies in our kitchen sink?
Remove stuffing from mattresses to create burrows?
Tunnel under our lawns to make ridges and furrows?
Will monkeys swing from our huge chandeliers?
Chimps drive our cars and strip all the gears?
Cows graze through our parks and horses run free,
no saddles inhibiting their liberty?

Just imagine our world once mankind is vanished.
Once we’ve insured we are finally banished.
Clean air and clean oceans. No traffic or noise.
No cars and no airplanes. No rush hour noise.
No traffic or crowds. No exhaust pipes or trash.
No credit cards, coupons or coinage or cash.
What we saw as improvements will all rust away,
covered with vines, to slowly decay.

Mankind just a segment of time’s stony layers,
our music and art and headlines and prayers
all just one strata within the earth’s stories,
buried like all of her other brief glories.
After we’ve suffered earth’s most recent purge,
and we’re all gone, what else will emerge?

 

For NaPoWriMo 2021 Day Four, Liminal Poem

No Vacancy

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No Vacancy

Hurry your feet and speed up your caboose.
We’ve only minutes left to vamoose.
It’s a nuisance, I know, but our time has run out.
It will do you no good to object or to pout.
The antithesis to one’s arrival is going.
The fact this was coming was well in our knowing.
The details of our living here now are archival.
Just as we saluted upon our arrival,
we now must wave bye-bye and pack up our bags,
fasten their locks and attach our name tags.
You may strive to remain here, but we must be gone.
We’re a nuisance here. We must now move over yon.
That’s the thing with exotic weekend vacations.
There’s always someone with Monday reservations!

Word prompts today are caboose, antithesis, salute, strive and nuisance.

NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 2 The Road Less Taken in a Modern Age

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The farther up the mountain we went, the smaller the road became. I was on the outiside and for most of the way the drop was severe–with no siderails or walls or shoulders. Vertigo? Yes.

The Road Less Taken in a Modern Age

Who wanders for pleasure, wanders alone
marking no boundary, barrier, zone.
The earth has no limits and time has no chime,
my steps undetermined by schedule or clime.

This used to be my modus operandi—
travel my sweet tooth and freedom my candy.
No email or Google, no iPad or phone,
without Internet service, I rolled like a stone.

But today I am traveling from town to town
with heavier luggage–more weighted down.
And though I go singly, I’m never alone
thanks to my computer, my Kindle and phone.

Right now I’m imprisoned and my progress is bound
by the cords of my ear buds confusingly wound
round my camera charger and Ethernet connector.
My GPS determines my vector.

No more do I travel unfettered and free.
Cell tower to tower is where I must be;
so every person that I’ve ever met
has me perpetually in their debt.

Birthdays to remember and twitters to answer,
queries of grandchildren, hip sockets, cancer.
Traveling with this extra weight is not pleasant.
I much prefer traveling just in the present

unfettered by email, phone calls or that voice
calling instructions at every choice
of northwards or southwards or eastward or west.
Yes, I know GPS directions are best,

but if I’m never lost and never alone,
I’d best just stay home and talk on the phone,
for most of adventure has come when I’m lost
from all of my past, whatever the cost.

Still the ways of the present make planning much easier,
finding my next destination much breezier.
These tricky freeways have changed in past years
and I find my memory much in arrears.

So perhaps for today I’ll turn on GPS
so I won’t get so lost and I won’t have to guess
which freeway to take: eight-oh-eight? Eight-oh-six?
Getting myself in a terrible fix.

Tomorrow’s the time to become vagabond,
using personal radar and my fairy wand
to maneuver through life by the skin of my pants.
Just for today, I won’t take the chance!

for NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 2

The Wordsmith’s Divulgence

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The Wordsmith’s Divulgence

My story is a flamfoo, ornamented too excessively.
I always overdo it. I’m over-endowed expressively.

Why use one word with two in mind? I fear I’m never spartan.
Instead of wearing loincloths, my poems are dressed in tartan!

Instead of coming one-by-one, my thoughts come in a storm.
So many little busy bees, descending in a swarm.

I do not have the patience to select them one-by one.
When I seek to edify, I simply find it fun

to pile on word after word. The more the merrier.
Bald truth is not my forte. I prefer my grand thoughts hairier!

 

 

Prompt words today are patience, wordsmith, flamfoo, edify and storm. A flamfoo, by the way, is a gaudily overdressed woman or an ornament of her dress.

By All Means

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By All Means

Grandmother Air, Grandfather Tree,
forgive our eccentricity
in doing what we’ve done to thee.

The parricide that we have done
is more than just a smoking gun.
If it’s a war, chaos has won.

By burning, we’ve killed both of you.
Nature’s response should be our clue
that our end, too, is well in view.

No prankster when you make your threat,
you state explicitly, and yet,
still your message we fail to get.

An accurate interpretation
is that man’s manipulation
has resulted in great agitation.

Everything’s off-balanced and
gotten rather out of hand.
So nature has to make a stand.

Her arsenal is most minute.
and though mankind is most astute,
ironically, hard to refute.

Fools will say that we have won,
but still, when all is said and done,
we still hold the smoking gun.

If we don’t change our reckless course,
and solve our problem at its source,
she will respond with greater force.

Be it virus, fire or wind,
if our ways we do not mend,
we’ll be the means to our own end.

Prompt words today are eccentric, air, accurate, prankster and grandfather.

Music of the Spheres II: If Mankind Were A Thought Bubble

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Music of the Spheres II:
If Mankind Were A Thought Bubble

What else might nature have done
if it had wanted to have fun?
Could it have made a man, instead
of hair, with hands above his head?
To grab the brush from off the shelf
so it could simply groom itself?
Could the music of the spheres
have been reduced to human ears?
A sort of cosmic saxophone
that altered mankind bone on bone?
Kindness bubbling up from ooze
to be the quality we’d choose
instead of hate and greed and trouble?
What if man were just a bubble
rising through the ocean’s murk
to rise to air and go to work
to turn into a different sort
of human driven to comport
himself with generosity?
You for you and me for me
lost to perpetuity?
What a different world we’d see.
All for one and one for all
precluding mankind’s final fall.
How I wish this fantasy
was all that I would have it be.
Not just a dream within my head
but how things really worked instead.

 
The NaPoWriMo prompt was to watch this video and write a poem based upon it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX_xh2do3eM

And HERE is the NaPoWriMo prompt.