Category Archives: Poem

More Fire on the Mountain

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Above are photos taken yesterday morning (May 3.) What looks like a bank of clouds is actually smoke from a fire that has been raging for five days on the slopes of Mount Garcia, the extinct volcano across the lake from me.


The grainy shot above (taken with my phone, so not the best photo) was taken at about 1 a.m. this morning, May 4th, from my rooftop terrace. If you want to get a better view of the fire, have a look at the time-lapse video for the past 24 hours on this site: http://www.ajijicweather.com/lakecam.

When Forgottenman suggested I write about the fire, I reminded him that I actually had written about fires on Mount Garcia many years ago, and he further suggested I reblog that blog, so, always willing to please, below is a link. The Maria Phoenix restaurant I mention, which became a favorite of mine after this first visit, has since been sold to new owners, but still, as regular as clockwork, Señor Garcia (as locals fondly call the mountain) continues to wear his yearly sombrero of smoke. Here is the link to my poem about the fires eight years ago:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2013/04/18/dining-alone-at-the-maria-bonita-restaurant-bar-day-18-of-napowrimo/

Sparse Reward

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Sparse Reward

One aspect of my mall visit makes me want to bawl.
I don’t glimpse a single thing I want to buy at all!

Prompt words today are glimpse,  aspect, bawmalll and mall.

The Custodian’s Lament

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The Custodian’s Lament

I’m deluged by duty and lack an excuse.
A note from my mother won’t stop this abuse.
My boss has turned into that proverbial bully
who insists that I carry my job tasks out fully.
He says sweep the corridor, empty the trash.
It’s a menial method for earning my cash.
Wish I’d paid more attention in school back when
my teachers insisted that I take my pen
and answer those questions in English and math,
and started my life out on some other path.
Now I’m pushing a mop instead of  a pen,
thinking too late of what might have been!

 

Prompts for today are excuse, corridor, proverbial, deluge and duty. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash, used with permission.

Marriage Vows

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Marriage Vows

Sure of their joyful union, they’ll never rue the day
that they exchanged their vows on that blissful day in May,
but read their bitter interviews gathered five years hence,
accusing and denying, angry, bitter, tense.
Those whom God hath brought together let no human flout.
Every couple means their vows when given, there’s no doubt,
but kids and bills and taxes and a pretty new assistant
can create a need to grow increasingly more distant.
Hard to keep compliant to a former vow
when fate intervenes with that ever-changing now.

 

Prompts for today are union, sure, joyful, may and interview.

NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 30

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How to Find a Poem

Only a fool waits for a poem to come to him.
You have to call for it like a proper blind date,
knocking on its door
and seeing beauty in whatever opens it.

Take it dancing.
Twirl it around the floor,
letting words fly off in all directions.

Leave what flutters off alone.
Someone else will pick it up
and dance with it.
No word is a wallflower,
although some are chosen more frequently to dance.
Those are the words to avoid.
 
Do not always choose the prettiest words.
In the dance of the poem,
the ugliest of words acquire a charm.

Do not insist that you yourself lead.
Let the poem, instead, draw you
off the dance floor,
out the door
and down the path
to deep woods
where all the wild words live.

Gather them in bouquets
or weave them into chains
to crown your head––
that head of the poet
who follows where the poems go
and collects them by armfuls to share with the world.

 

The last NaPoWriMo prompt for the year 2021 is to write a poem in the form of a series of directions describing how a person should get to a particular place.

 

The Window-Peeker Parses the School Marm

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The Window-Peeker Parses the School Marm

Though you’re unaware that you’re in my view,
as you sit parsing sentences, I’m parsing you.
And though you may find my excuse to be spurious,
I’m not lascivious. I’m only curious.

I peer through your window to discover a clue
if tight-lipped and buttoned-up is the real you.
I peek through a bush after climbing your fence.
Do you underline verbs and determine their tense?

No bushes or flower vines hamper my vision
to soften the view or to curb my derision.
Your life is as clear and empty and sparse
as the students you aim for and lines that you parse.

Every inch covered from your toes to your chin,
terry cloth robe. No booze and no men.
No bright colored pictures to cover your wall.
Not one detail to alter your image at all.

You sit at a desk looking tired and grim,
pallid and stringy and scrawny of limb—
essays piled to left and to right,
your strict narrow lips revealed in the light.

Everything minimum, like you have taught.
Strip sentences bare. Make them sparse, clear and taut.
Then you push back your chair, straight-backed and hard-seated
and seem to sigh. Is your patience defeated?

As you move to the window, a surge of past fear.
Have you sensed an old student is hovering near?
As you come to view the moon’s budding crescent,
I slip over the fence and become evanescent.

 

On day 29 of NaPoWriMo, they urged us to peek into a window and tell what we see.
Meanwhile, the prompts from five other sites were: curious, hamper, evanescent, parse and minimum.

Mean Woman Blues at the Corner Bar: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 28

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The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a poem that is a series of questions. Mine are all song titles save for one famous line from literature.

Mean Woman Blues at the Corner Bar

Him: What’s up Pussycat? Are you lonesome tonight?
Her: Can you mend a broken heart?
Him: Do-ya do-ya do-ya do-ya wanna dance?
Her: Who are you?
Him: Hello, Hello. Bad, bad Leroy Brown. What’s your name?
Her: Hello. Mary Lou!
Him: Ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight?
Her:  Who let the dogs out?
Him: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
Her: What’s going on? Hang on, Sloopy!
Him: Wouldn’t it be nice?
Her:  (Looking down,) Is this a dagger which I see before me?
Him: Can’t you see, can’t you see?
Her: Is that all there is?
Him: Do you really want to hurt me?
Her: Would you still love me tomorrow?
Him: What’s love got to do with it?
Her: How did it get so late so soon?
Him: Does anybody really know what time it is?
Her: Should I stay or should I go?
Him: Do ya think I’m sexy?
Her: (taking out her car keys) Do you know the way to San Jose?
Him: Are you going to go my way?
Him: (To her back as she walks out the door) What’s goin’ on? Am I that easy to forget?
Him: (To the room at large) Can’t you see, can’t you see what that woman, she been doin’ to me?
A stander-by:  What I can see clearly now is what becomes of the broken-hearted!

In case you want to play along or read more poems written to this prompt, here is the NaPoWriMo prompt . Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash, used with permission. If you doubt any of the song titles or want to know who sang them, just Google them. I ran out of time or I would have made links.

Heart’s Eye, NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 27

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NaPoWriMo’s assignment for today was to find a word in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and to use it to prompt a poem. I chose the word “vellichor.” Here is its definition:
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Since I wrote a poem about vellichor just two months ago, I’m reblogging it here.


Heart’s Eye

Who can pass a bookstore door
and fail to note the vellichor
or fail to feel within their heart
the message of a piece of art?
A  poignant poem or pithy quote,
well-loved and thereby learned by rote,
is a means by which we might denote
that part of us that we devote
to what we can’t repudiate—
that part of us that is a gate 
to a special way of seeing—
the heart’s eye of a human being.

 

Here is the link to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Here is the link to today’s NaPoWriMo’s prompt.

Moratorium

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Moratorium

I’m waging a campaign against your excesses.
You don’t need more shoes or jewels or dresses.
I’m sending a notice to wherever you shop
that your random purchases just have to stop!

Your profligate spending’s way out of control.
Abstemious behavior should be your new goal.
I abhor that I’m having to start this campaign
and hope that my efforts will not be in vain.

I’m not suggesting that you turn ascetic,
It’s simply that your present life is pathetic.
You buy and you buy and you buy and you buy
’til the Amazon boxes are stacked to the sky.

Then you head to the mall to buy a bit more,
’til your closet is fuller, I swear, than the store!
Now my salary cannot keep up with the strain,
so I must insist, dear, you try to refrain.

To help, I have cancelled your credit cards, then
tackled your charge accounts, closing all ten.
I’ve taken you off my bank account, too.
hoping to try to educate you

to the fact that life’s more than spending and spending.
I hope that my excessive acts will be ending
your own excesses, and that you’ll find
new hobbies to fill your acquisitive mind.

Prompt words today are random, abhor, abstemious, ascetic and campaign.

Mad Poem: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 26, Parody

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Mad Poem

We’ve been pinned to our homes
for a year, maybe more,
and after a month
it’s turned into a bore.
We’ve stared at computers
or the walls of our rooms,
our social encounters
just tweets, Skypes or Zooms.
We’ve missed our Starbucks,
the beach and the mall.
Our range of diversions
has been nothing at all.
Restaurant after restaurant
called on the phone
has said they were closed
and to leave them alone.
When we called up our friends,
we had nothing to say
for we did the same things
for day after day.
We yearn for the freedom
that will come with a vacc.
It’s not fair that our elders
can get what we lack!

 

My poem was a parody of the Dr. Seuss poem below:

Sad Poem

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a parody of another poem.