Category Archives: Poem

What Little Worlds

What Little Worlds
(Ode to a Tiny Fungi on the Rainforest Floor)

What little worlds are lost to us
there on the jungle floor
as, looking up,
we tread them underfoot.

Perhaps whole civilizations
extinguished on those orange orbs—
A solar system of planets with their denizens
too microscopic for us to see.

Heedless Gods we are, our mighty glances
overlooking much of what’s beneath us.

But for the camera lens,
how much more we would miss
as we go about our busy greater world.

 

For the dVerse Poets Fungi Prompt. Memories of the Lacandón jungle, 2008. Other small memories of that adventure are below (fungal and non-fungal.)

If These Walls Could Talk


Coping with the 2020’s
If These Walls Could Talk

“It’s for your own welfare that we tell you this,”
my four walls all conspired to tell me with a hiss.
Your life is but a fantasy. It’s dreams that tell the truth.
It’s daylight that echoes the things that are uncouth.
If you could but live in dreams, your life would be an idyll.
It’s living with reality that makes one suicidal.

Prompt words today are echo, welfare, fantasy and idyll. This poem was written in response to the below comment on THIS POEM made by my friend Mary Francis McNinch of the Murdo Girl blog.   “A sad moment. A poem like this with the house talking would be good, too.”

HERE is Mary’s own Talking House poem.

 

Playing with Matches

Playing with Matches

A family of good repute,
attractive, rich and most astute,
they were nonetheless resistant,
stubborn, pig-headed, persistent
in the planet’s sure demise.
It should have come as no surprise
when they chose to politicize,
using that influence money buys
to become candidates who chose
to rape and pillage, preen and pose
but did not care a single whit
about the planet, but ravaged it.

They paid for monetary gains
with forest fires and hurricanes.
Cared only for self-serving wealth,
forfeiting safety, and the health
of thousands who fell to the threat
of pestilence and grief and debt.
What cared they of the good of those
who didn’t sport designer clothes—
who hobnobbed with the hoi polloi
so lacking in finesse and joy?

And so politicos and cronies,
ministers and other phonies,
rap stars, lawyers, politicians
fed their spoils to the morticians.
That triangle of greed and crassness
together with the cruel vastness
of their dishonesty and greed,
like a virus commenced to breed
foment in what used to be
a bastion of democracy.

Kids in cages, plagues that flourished—
who cared if the undernourished
perished to the awful swell
so long as billionaires were well?
For four long years their riches grew,
feeding on the likes of you!
The monarch yielded royal scepter
as the inept grew  still inepter,
ruling with a heedless hand
to rape the populace and land.

Until the nation finally turned
and, finally, travesty spurned,
kicked out the dolt and started to
restore order to the zoo.
Trump’s hand finally overtrumped,
his evil minions finally bumped
from positions they never mastered,
thrown on the junk heap with the bastard!
The whole world hopes we’ve finally learned
those who play with matches are burned!!!!

 

Sorry, but the prompt words made me create one last rant. I hope this subject is now closed! Prompt words today are triangle, planet, persistent and repute.

The Sun Hat

The Sun Hat

Her hat’s broad brim shadows her face,
discouraging his fond embrace.

He removes the hat and then
plants a kiss where it has  been.

Both actions—kiss and hat removal
have the lady’s full approval.

So, with no further ado,
he makes it two!

For dVerse Poets: Embrace.

Last Meeting

Last Meeting

Listen to the nightingale. Do not dispute the loon.

The truth is told by lonely things calling under the moon.
Brought to the brink, their plaintive truth we cannot impugn
as we glide to their music, out into the lagoon.

Waves form spreading circles around our small pontoon.
Internal sorrows follow them, lapping a soulful tune.
Slanted columns of moonbeams are swallowed by each dune.
Like our brief encounter, over too soon, too soon.

 

Prompt words are brink, column, internal and impugn. Image by Damir Spanic on Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Sated

Sated

Flirtation is cathartic—a furbelow of life.
Though it is mainly fictitious, still it eases pain and strife.
It sets our spirits soaring and makes us feel much younger,
but takes the edge off appetites without dispelling hunger.

A nibble here, a small bite there might set our lips to smacking,
but a deeper part of us detects what might be lacking.
Caviar on toast is fine for an initial tasting,
but what we need is turkey,
crisp and golden from its basting,

but succulent inside, or a meal that fills us up
like an egg salad sandwich or pea soup in a cup.
Flirting’s great for starters, but it isn’t real.
What really solves an appetite is eating the whole meal.

Prompt words for today are soaring, cathartic, fictitious and furbelow.

Stories Told by Silence

Stories Told by Silence

Silence has a language unique to every ear.
Anyone can hear it if they choose to hear.
Do you listen to your silences? The various tales they tell?
I’ve listened to them my whole life. I know them very well.
Their insistent voices burrow through my thoughts,
trail their separate stories and tie them into knots.

Some seek out yarns in chaos: carnivals and bars,
rodeos and festivals, parades and speeding cars.
But there’s drama in the silence as it gathers round—
stories waiting patiently for you to hear the sound
of voices in the quiet. Hush now. Do you hear?
They’ll settle on your shoulder and whisper in your ear.

Silence owns no copyrights. It’s there for you to steal.
Unsort its separate strands and then spin them on your wheel.
The fiber of your silence can be woven into tomes.
Weave them into novels, storybooks and poems.
Stories are out there waiting. Hush and you might hear them.

Reach out and grab one for yourself when you venture near them.

 

Prompt words today are silence, tell and insistent.

We Cannot Surrender Her

 


 

We Cannot Surrender Her

Try as I might to urge her on, she will not go.
She sends me on to test the water
but remains on the shore.
Ankle deep and then no more.
Fingers trailing and then no more.
Having once found a false bottom,
she trusts no foothold.
The falling is the thing, I tell her, yet she holds back from the fall.

Let me go down, I beg her.
I will always bring you up, she answers.
This is the role we alternate being the stand-in for.
What I want she keeps me from.
What she fears I pull her toward.

How many of us, children of the fifties,
find ourselves on this seesaw, wanting to control the ride?
Relax, I tell her, but she can’t relax––fearing what relaxation brings.
She cannot surrender herself.  I cannot be content until she does.
Two-in-one, we rail against each other, then hold hands.
Comforting.  This is enough, she tells me.
Nothing is ever enough, I tell her.

This is my third major rewrite of this poem originally written in 1976. Only three lines still remain from that poem. It is perhaps finished now.

Here is the link if you’d like to participate in dVerse Poet’s Open Link night and here is the link to read other poems for dVerse Poets Open Link Night

Detritus


Detritus

Not given to unicorns and eloquent language,
my melodrama is fueled with common things:
more bad news from the media,
a baby possum murdered by the cats,
the shattered precious wine glass from a dwindling set.

Friends fall like drying petals from a bougainvillea vine,
      the world grown more cruel 
           not only from the brutalities of age,
                         but by the decisions of short-sighted power-brokers
                                              throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

                (The choice of that inelegant, time-worn phrase
             the result of too many months of isolation—
            giving up first the makeup and the hairbrush,
             then the bra,
                 then the bother of digging
                      for the perfect unique metaphor.)

Cities of books and projects                                    
started but not finished,
albums full of photos I mean to scan,
pile up on tables                                     
  and the floor.                                    

                         Bougainvillea petals
scattered
over the terraza
                                                        by the still-laid table,

                               obscuring tiny shards
of delicate glass.

 

Click on photos to enlarge.

 

Prompt words today are eloquent, unicorn, media and melodrama.

Shelter in Place

Shelter in Place

I’m balanced on the precipice. Should I plunge or not?
I don’t know how to fly, and for sure I won’t be caught.
I’ll be disappointed if I don’t, but frightened if I do.
One says to remain while the other prompts adieu.

Every life decision is a choice between
leaving to see more or staying with what I’ve seen.
Both choices irresistible. Which one do I chose?
Either way I win and either way I lose.

Time and time again I’ve chosen the same choice.
“Be off to your future self” speaks with the loudest voice.
Only now does nature make my choice for me—
instead of changing places, to stay and explore “me.”

 

Words of the day are adieu, plunge, disappointed and precipice.