Category Archives: Poem

Edible Augury

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Edible Augury

It was a type of augury, our playing with our food,
though Daddy said to stop it and Mom said it was rude.
Surprises in spaghetti, discovered loop by loop—
the future written out in words within our alphabet soup.

Mashed potatoes were our crystal balls. They told us what we’d be
stirring them around our plates to see what we could see.
We flattened peas with tines of forks and piled them in  towers
and when they fell, we saw if they foretold our future powers.

When Grandma saw us doing it, she’d rap us on the fingers
with a colossal soup spoon. The memory still lingers.
And yet I still play with my food—a type of edible rune.
I like it more these days since I’ve outlived the ominous spoon!

Image by Rakhmt Suwndi on Unsplash. Used with permision. Word prompts today are spoon, ominous, augury and surprising.

Light and Dark

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Our Children Follow in Our Footsteps

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

Our children follow in our footsteps

Light and Dark

Darkness is a costume that light dons every night,
drawing ghoulish shadows around her blinding light.
Outlandish to surrender to midnight’s inky stain,
then return as Aurora—shedding her light again.
Why do we seek our opposites? What could the purpose be?
The mountains meet the valleys. Desert gives way to sea.
Every single element and every creature, too—
Christian and agnostic, Arab, Hindu, Jew,
lives with all these contrasts jostling within.
Goodness gives way to evil. Piety battles sin.
Frolicking or feuding, our inner natures jell—
drawing us toward Heaven and/or jerking us toward Hell.
Day by day how can we know how we’ll go down in history?
This alchemy of opposites still remains Nature’s mystery.

Word Prompts today are shadows, outlandish, ghoulish, frolic, light and costume.

Ode to a Spider, Best Spinner of All, and to a Mosquito, Caught in its Thrall

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To the Spider

Insatiable monster, you spin your fine strands,
creating your trap with abdominal glands.
You then cast your nets out into the breeze
that carries them off to the bushes and trees.
With anticipation, you wait in the center
for mosquitos or flies—whatever may enter
your gossamer trap. Then, their prospects are dire,
for one tremor of contact is all you require
to be off in a flash to put them to bed
with  a cocoon of silk wrapped from bottom to head.

To the Mosquito

“I am” says the spider, as she sips out your sap,
“going to have a light lunch, and then take a nap!”

 

The spider pulls the silk created from liquid in its body through its spinnnerets – silk-secreting organs on its abdomen. Once the thread is started, the spider lifts its spinnerets into the breeze. It’s the breeze that is the secret to the spider’s ability to spin a web from one tree to another.

 

Prompt words today are anticipation, insatiable, monster, require, I am and spider.

Casting About for Fame and Recognition

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Casting About for Fame and Recognition

I’ve never done a single thing of any magnitude.
I’m not in any centerfolds, posed there in the nude.
 I’d love to give a Ted talk, but I simply do not dare.
I’m nervous in the limelight, a stranger to the glare.

Peak climbing is too vigorous, so I avoid Mt. Everest.
I don’t compete in spelldowns for I’m simply not the cleverest.
Each autumn when the leaves turn, I swear I’ll turn one, too.
I’ll examine all my talents and find one that I’ll do.

I’ll write the next great epic tale. I’ll sail to Zanzibar.
But writing isn’t easy and that voyage is too far.
I’ll buy paints and a canvas and combine the two,
I’ll find out if great artistry is what I’m meant to do.

Or maybe I’l adopt ten kids and have a try at mothering.
See if I can show the correct interest without smothering.
If I approach this task with correct energy, less fear,
perhaps I can obtain my fame as mother of the year!

Prompt words today are strange, magnitude, nervous, vigorous, something you’ve always wanted to do and leaves.

Memory

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Memory

Life is like a labyrinth. Things may be just fine,
yet we don’t know what awaits us farther down the line.

We can’t discern our futures, so we must enjoy today
so at least we’ll have a past to remember, come what may.

Changes of perspective are bound to come with time.
We may not have the passions that we had in our prime.

We are changeable creatures. So nature has intended.
If we hold onto earlier goals, our lives may get upended.

In times of adversity, we still possess rare treasures.
Our recollections are where we can hoard our former pleasures.

 

Prompt words for today are down the line, adversity, labyrinth, discern, change of perspective and creature.

Foxes Under Moonlight

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Foxes Under Moonlight

The phantasms rise in tandem as they seep out of their boxes
to caress the bats and tantalize the foxes
by swooping through their caves and pulling at their tails.
Of all the foxes’ problems, they cause the most travails.

On Halloween they haunt the world, including you and me,
but in the interim, they aren’t allowed to wander free.
They’re restricted to the meadows, the byways and those places
where they are not likely to encounter human faces.

Phantasms are not cordial. They harry and they tease.
They seep into the smallest crack and travel on the breeze.
They stir up other spirits and agitate the fleas,
causing havoc everywhere and doing what they please.

So though they might harass your world every Halloween,
and though they might be spine-tingling and horrible and mean,
it is the one night of the year they leave the foxes be,
so the foxes are beholding to the likes of you and me.

If you should dare to wander through the forest and the trees
on this All-Saints evening, get down on your knees
and peer into the burrow of the soundly sleeping foxes
curled up in a ball with their noses near their soxes.

See them sleeping soundly, undisturbed within their dreams—
twitching in contentment under the moon’s full beams?
Your one night of terror is the fox’s only break.
Be grateful for your haunting, if just for the foxes’ sake!

Word prompts today are interim, cordial, phantasm, tandem, outside the box and dusk. Ghosts may take it easier on foxes on Prince Edward Island, as is evidenced by this fox that I observed spending a good half hour or so basking in the sun of the yard of my friends Dianne and Andy. Or perhaps it was the sunlight that drove the phantasms away. Or our presence.

Dem Bones

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Dem Bones

The skeletons are all tucked in, safely in their beds
with naughty vitriolic dreams swirling through their heads.
Their atrocious behavior saved for another day,
they will not raise a ruckus. They’re holding it at bay.
They’re resting up for Halloween which is the night that they
will throw aside their covers and come out to play!

 

Prompt words today are ruckus, vitriol, atrocious, play and skeleton.

Amused: OctPoWriMo Day 11: The Muse

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IMG_2907(photopainting by jdb)  

Amused       

When she enters, I’m in her thrall,
and I have no control at all.
Sometimes she carries a riding crop
and drives me on so I can’t stop.
She rides in smoothly from my dreams
inspiring reams and reams and reams
that must be written when I wake.
I’m driven onward for her sake.

If my muse should feel abused,
believe me, she is not amused.
She mounts my back and spurs me on
until all her words are gone––
released upon the teeming pages
while she rides off to join the sages
sitting there upon the shelf,
and I am left with just myself.

For OctPoWriMo Day 11

Bored of the Rings

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Bored of the Rings

I admit I am incurious about matters Uchronian.
When it comes to fantasy, my thoughts tend toward draconian.
Fiction is my genre but I like it more realistic—
my interest not quite stretching to themes that are more mystic.

Fantasy’s not toothsome. It’s lacking in its juice.
Give me fantasy or suicide, and I will choose the noose!
These plots I am averse to seem to have a different muse.
Werewolves in the moonlight? Characters I must accuse.

A Game of Thrones and Narnia are not a fit for me.
J.R.R. Tolkien is not my cup of tea.
I prefer Jane Austen, the Brontes and Anne Tyler.
But Ursula Le Guin? Please forgive if I revile her.

 

I beg forgiveness from science fiction/fantasy fans, as I know there are many I admire in this group, but I simply am not engaged by fantasy as I am by reality—even fictionalized reality (which I acknowledge as an oxymoron.) I must admit that I don’t really revile Ursula Le GuIn. It was either that or “file her,” which didn’t quite work as well. There are some limitations in rhyming, so I admit “revile” is harsh. And, to be fair, my husband and I once listened to the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on a trip back and forth across the U.S. and when we arrived home after that six-week trip, we sat in our driveway in our motor home for an extra half-hour to hear its end, but nonetheless, I was not motivated to wander farther along the paths of fantasy. And, to be fair, give a person a word like “Uchronia” as a prompt word and what do you expect?  Revenge was in order.  ;o)

Prompt words for the day are juice, fit, Uchronia, incurious, muse and moon. 

The Littlest Zombie

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The Littlest Zombie

Three small travelers, each attired in a different disguise
observe the  lambent candlelight filling the pumpkin’s eyes.
Its outside is a Jack-o-Lantern, while all its insides 
were scooped out for the candle, and then turned into pies.

A lurching small cadaver reaches out a hand,
intent on trick-and-treating, though he can barely stand.
He’s had a whiff of candy, which has made him come alive.
He’s seen the tiny Hershey bars. He hopes they’ll give him five!

Leaving, he now remembers to walk with legs unbent.
He breathes hard through his mask where his sister cut a vent.
He imitates the groans and huffs of the walking dead,
though if he’d had his druthers, he’d have been a dog instead.

But brother said a dog just barks and never moans and groans
and that barking trick-or-treaters are only given bones!
And so he screws his face up and puffs on down the block,
scaring all the littler kids with his zombie walk! 

 

Prompt words for today are whiff, imitate, cadaver, lambent and candy and also for OctPoWriMo.