Category Archives: Poem

No Hints Given

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First the five-foot high undergrowth had to be dealt with.
The state of the lot in July, 2021.

Click on photos to enlarge.

No Hints Given

Outdoors is bright and sunny. The rain has ceased its patter.
The pecking birds are pecking and the chattering birds chatter.
Butterflies stage a homecoming around the tabachine
announcing the retirement of the big machine
that worked the big lot next to me with giant rolling claws,
For eight long hours, it it scooped and scraped without a single pause.
It trounced the giant boulders and put them in their place,
crushed the weeds and tree limbs, leaving not a trace
of all the weeds and rubble, the stones and the debris,
burying it within the earth so we cannot see
all the ugliness of nineteen years’ accumulation.
of our neighborhood’s detritus, so here’s a small ovation.
What new event will crown this lot? What may be coming next?
I guess you’ll have to read about it in upcoming text.

 

I finally got my lot next door cleared of all the debris neighbors have been piling on it for 19 years. Wish I’d gotten a better photo of the “before,” but here are a a few Johnny-come-lately shots.

Prompt words today are outdoors, homecoming, sunny, trounce and text.

Animal Voices

12 Replies

 

 

IMG_5073 3

 

Animal Voices

My cat is very subtle, so I named her Innuendo.
Not so for the dogs, who always speak in a crescendo.

When they feel romantic, cats may wail an eerie tune,
but dogs need no testosterone to prompt their nightly croon.

Cats vocalize for grand events. Dogs blather on at small things:
a squirrel on the garden wall–literally all things.

Every passing siren causes canine howls to bloom.
They seem to herald catastrophe–to signal the world’s doom.

If cats should chance to dream a tune, they keep it in their bosom,
but I think dogs release their songs simply to amuse ’em.

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Word prompts today are: innuendo, bloom, bosom, blather and tune.

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

7 Replies

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

15 Replies

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

26 Replies

 

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

5 Replies

 

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.