Category Archives: Poem

Fourteen Minute Challenge

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Ever played a word in Scrabble that you didn’t know the meaning of? They acknowledged it as a word but you hadn’t the foggiest? This happened to me a short while ago. The word was siriasis and extra points to you if you know what it means. Quadruple points if you can write a poem making use of it within the next 14 minutes. Here is my 14 minute poem:

 

Rainy Day Reminder

You rue those rainy nights and days
when everything is in a haze
and you cannot go out the door
without whiffing petrichor.
Your hair is soggy, face too ruddy,
raincoat sodden, rain boots muddy.
And suffering from all this damping,
girls are in no mood for vamping.
It’s hard to flirt, I must confess,
when one is such a dripping mess.
But consider now the opposite.
When all day in the sun you sit,
you’ll never find men making passes
at girls who suffer siriasis!

 

(To save you the bother of your looking it up,  siriasis means sunstroke, but it was Bushboy who gave me a hint that led me to investigate the very interesting Australian origins of the word petrichor.)

Duranta Erecta (Verbena): FOTD May 21, 2020

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I had never learned the name of this flowering tree that I planted 18 years ago, and I thank Grace at broadwaymatron.com for telling me its name. I don’t know why it photographs as  blue as it is actually a dark purple. Perhaps too much sun. I like this blue color even more than its actual color, so I’ll support the illusion. Although the description calls it a bush, it says it can grow to 20 feet high. I think mine is about ten feet high–maybe higher.

Click on photos to enlarge.

 

For Cee’s FOTD

Reconnaissance

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Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash, used with permission

Reconnaissance

Enter our shell-shocked hero, all his battles won.
His glorious sorties over, his service finally done.
The stash he found cathartic? He stole it from his son.
Exulting in this final raid, he thought he’d have some fun.

He only took a bit of it. Each day he took some more.
He chewed the bag a little bit, as though to make a door.
He saw his son’s perplexity, searching through the house.
Had a rat made off with it? Could it have been a mouse?

He found his son’s new hiding places—where he had been loitering,
making use of thirty years of army reconnoitering.
The freezer in the garage, a tea tin in the drain.
What enemy made raids into such difficult terrain?

His son could believe sorties over mountaintop and ridge,
but how might a mouse invade a freezer or a fridge?
This mystery went unsolved for at least a decade more,
at which point it was finally told and became family lore.

How his father returned home, fatigued by years of war
and found relief from raiding his teenager’s secret store.
And how these retirement maneuvers against his puzzled son
helped salve the scars of battle with a little fun.

Word prompts for today are fatigue, stash, cathartic, exult and hero.

Fault Line

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Fault Line

When the call comes,
I feign ambivalence,
one more maneuver
to deny fault.

I did this
and you did that.
Who understands
the whole gestalt?

Back and forth we
thrust and parry
’til no one knows
who started what.

When did our love
became a battlefield?
That crest we aimed for
a well-worn rut?

Writing prompts today are: call, ambivalent, understated, maneuver and fault.

On the Fix

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On the Fix

She’s on the fix:
repairing hems, 
cleaning the oven,
puttying cracks,
organizing drawers,
straightening picture frames
with no idea
of how to fix
a cracked heart. 
She needs a breaking
of old habits
—a lesson 
on letting be,
leaving her broken things
to heal themselves.

 

 

Here is the prompt: https://dversepoets.com/
and below is where you can go to read other responses:
For the dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Fix

Unavoidable Photo Session

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Unavoidable Photo Session

I refresh my makeup,
surrender to the camera,
and when I see the photographs,
force a quick acceptance.
I need to diet
and I am growing old.

 

Word prompts today are surrender, photograph, quick, refresh and acceptance.

The Groom Dances with Grandma

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The Groom Dances with Grandma

She struggles to keep time as they circle ’round the floor,
her flushed face with its rosy hues signaling “no more!”
This dancing she once lived for has come to be a task,
whereas the problem once was whether any boy would ask.

Standing in the wallflower line, wishing for a fella,
whereas sixty years later, a chair and an umbrella
would serve to meet her wishes, for this dancing in the sun
at her grandson’s wedding has turned out to be no fun.

What she needs in her dotage is not cognate with the dreams
of those age fifteen fantasies that burst her at the seams,
spilling out her future hopes, sure they’d be the same—
that there would be no change of rules in this living game.

Memories of graceful maneuvers through the night
remembered at one’s leisure are a pure delight.
Yet all those youthful dreams of blithely swirling ’round the floor
have matured into her fantasies of sneaking out the door.

Word prompts for today are rosy hues, circle, dancing, cognate and umbrella. Image by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash, used with permission.

 

Meditations from My Room

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Click on photos to enlarge and view captions. A poem follows.

Art Studio
Today this new variety of swallowtail.
I have to catch them at rest. They whizz by too quickly to catch them in flight.
Now he’s not.
Diego and Morrie now think this is their studio as well.

Meditations from My Room

I share different  company in my isolation.
Dogs litter my studio floor,
and my backyard is
an in-between place for birds
passing as though at a freeway interchange,
this way and that.

A constant flutter of butterflies
stirs air around the orange and yellow thunbergia,
lush in this season that mixes sun and rain.
They soar down to the empty lot
and back again,
as though no creature can resist
collecting here in my domain.

Nature follows no rules of man.
It cannot learn obeisance or heed human leverage.
Our world, professional and polished—
how easily by nature now turned inward upon itself.

Our burnished world can hold no sway,
for nature heeds no golden cow.
Her empathy extended toward the broader view,
nature must change the things she can.
She has been patient  with us long enough. The time is now.

 

Prompt words today are empathy, leverage, patient, burnish and professional.

Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion

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Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion

“Pack up all your suitcases, we’re going on vacation.
Don’t forget your sleeping bags and some alimentation.
We’re heading out in two hours for the challenge of your lives,
so load up all your kids and hurry up your wives.
I’m making a pronouncement that perhaps you won’t agree with,
but since you are the folks that I most enjoy to be with,
I spent all of your legacies on this giant bus
that it is my fondest wish to fill with only us
and set out for the summer having various adventures.
Most likely we’ll get lost and perhaps Gram will lose her dentures,
but all-in-all we’ll have great times that no one will forget.
You’re going to spend this summer with the finer set.

I’ve cleared it with your bosses. I’ve contacted your friends.
No need to call anyone. No need to make amends.
You’ll live without your boyfriends for a month or two.
Just tell them that your family needs some time with you.
Go and find your places–kids all in the back.
I have some games to play with you while your mothers pack.
No phones, laptops or notebooks are allowed aboard the bus.
I want communication to be narrowed down to us.
I’ll teach you snakes and ladders, Monopoly and Chess.
You can beat your Uncle Tom and your Auntie Bess,
your grandma and your sisters, your cousins and your brother.
Why bother to beat someone else when you can beat each other?”

The ending you might well project. The mom’s find fault. The kids object.
But once he’d packed us all inside and started out on our grand ride,
we settled down and all joined in to get to know their closest kin
and all in all, that summer trip, each tent-pitching, each skinny dip
turned into one fine memory, just as Gramp knew it would be!

(Click on photos to enlarge and view as slide show.)

Morning brought Patti’s scrambled eggs

 

Prompt words today are pronounced, legacy, challenge, alimentation and suitcase. Sadly, this is fiction and the photos a compilation of various friends and family. I wish this had happened, but alas, it didn’t. The fourth photo is a picture of part of my actual family.

Cold Jack Ice

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The dVerse Poets prompt was to write a poem inspired by one of these vegetable names. I’m going to try to use them all: Black Beauty, Trail of Tears, Lazy housewife, princess, purple queen, Jacob’s cattle, The Czar, Wizard, golden acre, dazzling blue, purple sword, Jack ice, Reine de Glaces, blue fire, aurora, tender and true.

Cold Jack Ice

As accomplished in his love-making as at a game of dice,
his name was John Dukakis, but they called him Cool Jack Ice
because his smile could warm or freeze, depending on the way
his luck played out or didn’t, as it changed from day to day.

When he purchased Jacob’s cattle and his Golden Acre Farm,
He thought that he would use them to impress the new school marm.
He’d be a wizard as a cowboy, a czar of cultivation.
He’d win her as his bride before the coming school vacation.

He’d heard she was an ice queen a real “Reine de Glacé.
And since he was the King of Ice, he knew the game to play.
He donned his purple sword and a coat of dazzling blue.
If he was to be her Lochinvar, he knew just what to do.

He swooped down on his Ellen at the school fete,
saved her from the stag line and took her on a date.
The aurora borealis shone down from far above
As, feigning true and tender, he declared undying love.

He called her his sweet princess for those months he sought to woo her.
It was only after they were wed that he began to rue her.
She was a lazy housewife, he said, and counted coup,
taunting her as his black beauty as he beat her black and blue.

She fled into the freezing cold, a trail of tears behind her,
taking refuge in a secret place where he would never find her. 
And as her bruises turned her into a purple queen,
she plotted out her vengeance, silent and unseen.

They say it was blue fire that streaked across that night
that both Jack Frost and Black Jack Ice took their final bite.
What footsteps there were left were so filled up with snow
that not a single tracker could tell where they might go.

Severed from its body, Jack’s face had ceased to smile
as the one who wiped it off his face sped onward, mile by mile.
on Jack’s steed, and since that day, no one has defamed her,
for to put it bluntly, not one who knew him blamed her!

And, in case you didn’t read it before, here’s another poem I wrote about an heirloom tomato: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/02/12/aunt-lous-underground-railroad-tomato-for-black-history-month/

FordVerse Poets prompt.