Category Archives: Poem

Rain, Rain

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Rain, Rain

The yearly rains extinguish the cauldron of the sun—
gunmetal sky, one wisp of cloud like a smoking gun.
When our prayers for rain to cease go without an answer,
once again, we voice vague threats to hire a necromancer.

A cosmopolitan traveller, rain roams the thirsty world
allaying drought and hunger with silver bullets hurled
to break apart hard-crusted earth, allowing plants to grow—
cornstalks pushing through the dirt, fresh fields of hay to mow.

With every living creature dependent on the rains,
still we cannot help but silently repeat the strains
of “Rain, rain, go away and come again some other day,”
when for weeks the rain pelts down from skies sunless and gray.

 

Prompt words today are cauldron, cosmopolitan, prayer and allay.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos on this site are by me.

Leftovers

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Leftovers

I’m feeling bodacious and pregnant with thought.
I’m ready to share everything that I’ve got.
Words weighty, bodacious and perhaps erogenous—
all of the parts of me rare or homogenous—
furnish the page when I’m in writing mode
and equipped to dig into the old mother lode.
I’m fertile with words and with erudition,
all my great plots coming into fruition,
but give me some room at this time of the day
for discarded words to get out of the way.
Don’t read this blog lest it turn you morose,
for you’ll trip over words if you follow too close.

Words abandoned and spurned lie below, broken-hearted—
disjointed phrases that I merely started—
I know it seems silly. Totally absurd,
but please give a small glance at a phrase or a word
that’s left over below, for words have feelings, too.
Steal a few for yourself from this discarded queue
if you should find any appealing to you
and write your own poem when you feel in the zone.
It’s the least I can do to try to atone
for my failure to launch them in poems of my own.
Otherwise, they will lie here abandoned, alone,
with no flesh around them. Words stripped to the bone!

Prompt words today are erogenous, pregnant, furnish, bodacious and mode.

       audacious                       bought          bode

                        tuition           darted      started.     do   glue      imbue

few                   hue   queue. 

                    cue rue stew               sue                 two

come into view                 whew            you                    zoo

verbose
code         goad lode             node rode           toad 
        phone              hone                alone stone
               shone tone    bone

 

Cruel Games

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Cruel Games

Tonight I am impervious to your charming lies.
They float like a conglomerate behind your velvet eyes.
Save your naughty bedroom tricks for your other hotties.
They hide like buried hatchets under buried bodies—
taloned falcons you disguise as the grip of love,
but I know the difference between raptor and dove.
Cruel actions are not love just because you name them so.
For me love is warm currents and not the hidden undertow.
The game you play may be enough for your other fools,
but the game of love I crave is played by other rules.

 

Prompt words today are conglomerate, impervious, tonight and bury hatchets under buried bodies. Image by Parker Gibbons on Unsplash.

Last Preteen Summer

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Last Preteen Summer

Lemonade days and popcorn nights,
mosquito hums and chigger bites,
stars like bullet holes in the sky
and meteors like years gone by.
On our backs in summer grass,
we buried childhood en masse,
obsessed with coming teenage years
and all our questions and our fears.

Cars passing in the still-warm night
held our expectations tight.
Eavesdropping, we heard the cries
of older girls and older guys
cruising the town unaware
of prepubescent listeners there
 sheltering in my backyard,
watching stars and trying hard
to imagine teenage joys
like nighttime rides in cars with boys.

For the Tuesday Writing Challenge: Lemonade Days.
Cropped image from Diego on Unsplash.
And, since I’ve just been informed that this is last week’s Tuesday prompt, I’m posting to their ‘Promote Yourself Monday‘ link as well.

Exercising Lethargy

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I’m not saying Forgottenman is lazy. I much admire his activity in getting out to mow his lawn once a week in the heat and humidity of the boot heel of Missouri, but let’s just say that otherwise, he is somewhat exercise-challenged, save for trips to Walmart for provisions, to the P.O. for mail or city hall to pay taxes or sauntering from bed to desk, desk to kitchen or laundry room and back again.

Other than those activities, his main exercise has for years been mental, save for a few trips where I’ve jogged his getalong a bit. Thus, I’d like to share with you this brief Skype conversation last night which led to a silly poem this morning:

Judy: Skype says you are active now. What are you doing? Jogging or pushups?
Forgottenman: Doing my lethargy exercises.
Judy: I believe lethargy exercises is a good topic for a poem, don’t you?
Forgottenman:  (Silence)
Judy: (15 minutes later)

Exercising Lethargy

Exercising lethargy? In that I am well-versed,
so pay attention to these moves that must be oft-rehearsed.
Use your pointer finger to call over the waiter.
Then point it at your forehead to jumpstart your debater.
Should you have the catfish or should you have the shrimp?
Do those mental pushups to show you aren’t a wimp.

When you bend down to pull up socks it is a major feat.
Not to mention leg extensions, for they can’t be beat
while slipping into loafers, so appropriately named.
Not to mention hitting targets where the feet are aimed.
Push away from tables when you are fully sated,
for the benefits of arm extensions cannot be debated,

Practice tactics that I’ve taught and I promise you’ll see
what benefits may thus be wrought perfecting lethargy.

A Walk in Summer Rain, FOTD June 27, 2021

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I went out to the garden to try to find a flower to photograph for today’s FOTD prompt. A slight misty rain cooled the air and the almost constant precipitation over the past 24 hours had jeweled the leaves and flowers. As you will see from the photos below, I couldn’t stop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Virtual World (Wordle 507)

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Virtual World

Beamed into this lifetime, we’re bitten, bruised and lost,
not knowing it’s a virtual world into which we’ve been tossed.
Reality a spectrum whose limits have been blurred,
how many feel their life is just a thing to be endured?
If that grand player tweaks the board a bit, adding more disaster,
might the game be over an eon or two faster?

If he adds another virus to aids and chicken pox,
If he bundles up more pieces and throws them in the box,
will Earth breathe her final breath at last, gasping, torn and weak?
Is that the master game move? Is that his final tweak?
Or will the game start over with new rules the next round?
And will the moves go smoother once new game pieces have been found?

 

Wordle prompts today are: beam, virtual, box, bruise, bit, lost, spectrum, torn, tweak, bundle, breathe and time. HERE is the link to read other submissions for this prompt. Image by Robert Coelho on Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Homeless

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Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

Homeless

Incomplete women and incomplete men
schlep up the avenue and back again
bearing their bundles over their backs,
the remains of their lifetimes stuffed into sacks.

Patiently trudging with impassive faces,
trying to find the impossible places
where they may rest, be they new ones or prior,
to find a safe haven and build a small fire.

What have they done to warrant this life?
To live out existence that cuts like a knife?
A wife who couldn’t put up anymore
with an abusive husband? A bully and bore?

Are his brains addled? Is he confused?
Were they once children neglected, abused?
They sit collected, their backs to the wall.
What will society do with them all?

Collect them in shelters or drive them away
from Interstate medians where by night and day
they lie hidden by bushes, secure, so they think,
to dream away days or to shoot up or drink?

Such wasted lives that have slipped through the cracks,
stripped of their power, defined by their lacks.
They line our sidewalks, devoid of our riches,
to show us society’s obvious glitches.

Prompt words today are incomplete, bundle, patiently, schlep and prior.

Enough

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Enough

At six o’clock, glib comments start to fill the air.
We’re hungry for frittata, but the table’s bare.
Darkness fills the kitchen, for mama’s gone on strike.
She’s gone off to the city. Alone, on papa’s bike.

It’s dicey whether she’ll return. She says she’s tired of cooking.
She’s in need of a vacation and so she made a booking
at a posh hotel that has its own cafe
where she will dine on coq au vin followed by crème brûlée.

For once, serving the rest of us will not be her fate.
Someone else will  wait on her and she’ll just sit and wait.
In the morning she will order service in her room
where she’ll not even make her bed or wield dust cloth or broom.

Her note says then she might come home, or she might just wait
and find a nice seaside resort where she can cogitate
for another day or two. She says we shouldn’t worry.
The pizza place delivers if we’re not in a hurry.

Her recipe book’s on the shelf. The stove is  under it.
Her apron’s in the closet and she’s sure that it will fit
each and every one of us while she is on vacation.
She says that fending for ourselves will be an education.

She says to wash the dishes even though it is a bore,
for if she sees a messy kitchen when she walks in the door,
she’s going to walk right out again until we prove we’ve learned
that things will be real different after Mama has returned!

 

 

 

 

Prompts for today are six, glib, frittata, dicey and darkness.

Small Towns in the Fifties

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Small Towns in the Fifties

Tight pants were forbidden. Baggy trousers were the rule.
And if you ever broke it, they sent you home from school.
Even the most nervy girls didn’t take the chance
to show up in assembly wearing sexy pants.

There were no vivid colors in our little town.
The houses that weren’t painted white for sure were tan or brown.
All the local color resided in its folks.
Their foibles and their oddities comprised the local jokes.

Gullible new arrivals were sure to take the lure
and all the timeworn stories, therefore have to endure.
The time that Arlan Boe did this and Ellen Jones did that.
The time that Shirley Carson put Bon Ami in Dolph’s hat.

The trick that old Jeff Halverson played on the new teacher.
Crank phone calls that the Watts boys made to the new Baptist preacher.
It seems rules of propriety extended just so far.
In a small town what you look like matters more than what you are.

 

Prompt words today are baggy trousers, lure, forbidden, nervy and brown. (The names and acts are all fictional, although the message perhaps is not.)