Category Archives: Poem

Heartful Gatherings: August 27, 2020

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Heartful Gatherings

Those who yawp on about rainbows and the weather are too wordy.
I’d rather converse at great length about topics more nerdy.
Crossed ankles and a pot of tea with polite conversation
seem somehow remiss in their mental titillation.
Give me feet up on the coffee table with a nerd or two—
both talk and a libation of a stronger brew.
Quantum physics, writing, music, games or art
make for a connection that is closer to my heart.
When it comes to cliques that I could  be a part of,
I prefer to find a group that I can find the heart of.

Prompt words for today are connection, nerd, rainbow, yawp and group.

Read the Signs

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Read the Signs

Days of wild adventure, pulsing with delights
are turning into zombie days that fade to zombie nights.
Nothing on our agendas. No traveling, no dates—
our calendars reduced to onerous empty slates.

It does no good to protest. God hears not when we ask.
We merely have to don that necessary mask.
Though every instinct urges camaraderie,
Mother Nature warns us that she will wait and see.

Will we clean up our messes? Put out every fire?
Calm her winds of warning before we all expire?
Ban plastic from her oceans, stop digging for black gold?
Cool the global warming and restore the cold?

If we will not listen, she’ll only turn deaf ears
to all our present pleadings, to all our future fears.
Oh foolish foolish children, just dealing with effects
instead of paying heed to what nature expects.

 

Prompt words today are instinct, nothing, protest, onerous and zombie.

Bumblebees (dVerse Poet’s Quadrille Challenge)

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Bumblebees

Plant some flowers, and they will come,
and though they have a fuzzy bum,
curb your finger, curb your thumb.
Have another sip of rum.
Crack your knuckles, pop your gum.
Call your sweetie, call your mum.
Bake some brownies and have you some.

Sing a ditty, whistle, hum.
Play tuba ‘til your lips are numb.
Strum your cello, pound your drum.
Sand your chair legs ‘til they’re plumb.
Pat your kitten’s furry tum,
but as these bumblebees go and come,
to pet one would be really dumb!!!!!

For the dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille Challenge: bum. Two quadrilles on this one!!

To see the challenge, go HERE.

Home Vacation

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Home Vacation

Exotic locations hold no sway with me.
I’d rather relax right here under my tree.
Here I’m sovereign of place. I’m the queen of the lot.
No finer vacation can ever be bought.

No accidental airline disaster,
no luggage to lose and I get here much faster.
The kitchen is close if I’m in need of sipping.
I need not wear masks and there’s no need for tipping.

Travel right now isn’t all that it was.
Its credibility lowered because
since we are not through with enforced quarantining,
we travel through videos and magazining.

So bring out the cards and bring out the dice,
and a dry gin martini , with olives, on ice.
If we can’t travel to Vegas or Reno,
we’ll have to make do with our home-grown casino!

Word prompts for today are sway, credibility, accidental, sovereign and location.

Designer Diets

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Designer Diets

I’m in need of a diet in front and behind,
yet I cannot survive on such food as the kind
that dieting gurus decree I must chew
like all of the reigning glamor queens do.

Designer lettuce and parsley and kale
with a soupcon of dressing is what they inhale.
They do not eat Oreos, bon bons or gummies.
They deterge their colons and staple their tummies.

No carbohydrates of any kind
will they order in diners, even in a bind.
And so they go hungry, albeit they’re svelte,
but I think I would rather just loosen my belt.

 

Prompts today are surviving, design, soupcon, deterge and kind.

Creeping Shadows

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Creeping Shadows

I have no wish to classify shadowy explorations—
furtive trips to low-life bars or questionable vacations.
I’m aloof in my present. I don’t think about my past.
I have no need to dwell upon times more overcast.
In past attempts to deal with them, I tried to rearrange them
to find they only frustrate me because I cannot change them.
Still, memory’s tyranny will win. I can’t escape, it seems.
Those shadows banished in the day creep back into my dreams.

 

Prompt words today are shadowy explorations, classify, aloof, frustrate and tyranny.

Retribution

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Retribution

I swallow screams for dinner,
hold my tongue the whole meal through.
I’m told I’ll have to eat my words
if I let slip a few.
I’m choking back the clever things
that I want to tell,
but all my smart rejoinders
simply will not jell.

“Better seen than heard,” they say,
and yet they do not see me.
If I’m not allowed to speak,
how will I ever be me?
When I grow up, I’ll talk and talk.
Never will I be quiet.
If someone tries to shut me up,
I simply will not buy it.

By then my folks will be real old.
To shush me? They won’t dare.
If they do, I’ll shush them back, 
and put them in a chair.
I’ll make them face the corner
and tell them to be quiet.
And if they say to eat my words?
I’ll say I’m on a diet!!!

 

For Poets and Storytellers United. Swallow Screams

 

Final Rights

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Final Rights

The legacy our mother left seems to have something missing.
Is it just coincidence I think I saw you kissing
her lawyer shortly after her funeral today?
It reminded me of earlier behavior, I must say.
Your high school English teacher whom you later held at bay
only after he had raised your grade from F to A.
Do I mean to insinuate it may have been a factor
in the raising of your grade that you’re such a primo actor?
Feigning school girl crushes until you’ve achieved your aim
and seducing gullible lawyers? Do I think that’s your game?
I must admit this codicil  that you have lately found
gives rise to questions. You should realize that we are bound
to question her late change of mind, leaving the bulk to you
when all the time that she was ill you never were in view.
The lawyer swears it’s aboveboard. These were our mother’s wishes.
Did she forget those countless times you would not do the dishes
but left the job to me as you hurried out the door?
The times you defied curfew, tracked up her just-mopped floor?
Because I was her favorite,  was it, then, her guilt
that made her deed to only you the house that Grandpa built?
Sister dear, your goose is cooked, for just a month ago
Mom fired the lawyer you seduced and hired one you don’t know.
He filed a new will signing the house over to me.
Mom foresaw your shenanigans and said they would not be.
Your lawyer’s response to your wiles? A small sin of omission.
Who could blame him for collecting his amorous commission?

Prompt words today are legacy, missing, reminded, insinuate and factor. Although the poem is fiction, this is actually the house I grew up in. 

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

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Picasso

 

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

Is it conceit or self-knowledge
that makes you paint yourself
in the ruffed collar
of Shakespeare
or a clown?

Satyr, young at heart,
your merry countenance
masks darker moods and behaviors,
the bright pigments
hiding a more somber undercoat.

Picasso,
your children
and your mistresses
might paint you as master:
stern, egotistical,
but always with the backlit inspiration
of genius.
Yet, old goat,
you paint yourself a clown.

 

Reblog For dVerse Poets: Clown

First Love: Fandango’s Dog Days of August, Aug 18

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Then and Now

First Love

Zing! went our heartstrings. Zang! went our souls.
Eyes filled with wonder, hearts cupped like bowls
ready to fill  with passion and love.
Putting each other on like a glove.

First kisses miracles we’d never known.
No longer single all on our own.
Someone to cuddle, someone to spoon.
Hand holds and lip locks over too soon.

Misunderstandings, squabbles and fights.
Heartbreak and lonely Saturday nights.
Then a new glance from cars “U”ing  main.
Flirting and wooing all over again.

More hugs and kisses parked on a hill.
How to forget them? We never will.
At school reunions, we relive those lives,
husbands beside us, or boyfriends or wives.

Talking of other things: study halls, games,
but always remembering carving those names
in desktops and memory—first loves forever—
tendrils that bind us that we cannot sever.

We’ll soar ahead to the rest of our lives,
collecting new memories—bees in our hives.
But no honey finer than that we made first.
No sweeter lips and no stronger thirst.

Stored in our hearts, remembered but hidden,
hoarded like treasures sealed in a midden,
our lives are made richer by both now and then.
Past memories opening over again

spill out old secrets, then seal them away
to be unwrapped on some future day
when old schoolmates meet for two days’ reminiscing
of school pranks and ballgames and homework. And kissing.

 

 

This is a reblog of a poem from four yers ago For FDDA :First Love