(Click on photos to enlarge.)
Backyard Adventures
No one to talk to. Nothing to do.
A trip to the kitchen. A jaunt to the loo.
Nowhere to go to. Forbidden to roam.
If I want to travel, I’ll do it at home.
Down in my garden, the flowers and bees
pose for my photos whenever I please.
I record the sights just to prove I have traveled,
clicking the sights as my journey unraveled
Word Processing
Lightning flashed,
sparking the current which fueled the dream.
Letters zinged across a field of white,
waiting for justification to join other letters
in neatly-spaced rows of words.
For split seconds between thought and white space,
they danced into the dream.
Smoothly, straight-backed l’s and i’s
slid together in magnetic minuets
while b’s and d’s bumped heavy bottoms,
vying for position.
Into the dream they went,
and then,
their brief dances over,
they froze into equal rows upon the stage
to watch the choreography
of each new letter as it joined them,
for the dream was of
entire dictionaries of words––
syllables holding hyphenated arms with syllables,
antonyms crowding synonyms in tight ironic cliques,
articles moving in swing rhythm
toward their appointed nouns.
Four rows of tables
faced the stage,
one fat spectator sitting on each table,
third row back,
surveying the white screen of the dream.
Applause issued from the table-sitters,
pushed out in broad solid farts––
brief ovations as they jumped from table to table
in swift movements
so that they themselves
seemed dancers on hot pavement.
When they paused,
it was to hover lightly over each table
before pounding short applause
with their fat rumps
and moving on.
Yet their applause was indispensable,
for it fueled the dream.
When lightning flashed again,
the dream stood still.
The dance over,
the spectators vanished
like the single-fingered ghosts they were.
Rain tapped the window,
adhering to the spider web
which hug like an intricate rope ladder
between the bougainvillea
and the window frame.
A distant alarm clock
burred into the silence.
A door opened,
and a woman
entered the empty room.
The dream called out to her from the screen,
but she did not heed it
as she disconnected the cord
that ran from the machine to the wall,
destroying its memory of the dream.
And so the poem died.
This, Too?
In planning for a place remote,
considering a life afloat.
I might collaborate with friends
so we can meet communal ends
planning out a scheme for life
far away from pain and strife.
We’d set a mutual course on seas
far away from the disease
that snakes its way as it might please.
And having learned our lesson well,
we’d escape this landlocked Hell
and float in colonies off shore,
keeping at least ten feet or more
apart until the curse was through
and we could start our lives anew.
But, alas, I have no yacht
and a sailor I am not,
So my sailing schemes are shot!
Instead, I’ll sail a sea of dreams
and face the threat landlocked, it seems!
So don’t drop in for a small visit.
A social life’s not healthy, is it?
I’ll pass my social life alone
chatting on the telephone
attired in my sleeping togs,
stroking the cats, patting the dogs,
communicating on my blogs
with all the humans I have left.
in a sequestered world bereft
of face-to-face and hip-to-hip,
let alone of lip-to-lip!!
This too shall pass, optimists say.
The world will see a brighter day.
We’ve survived aids, the plague and SARS,
global warming (so far) and cars.
We’re the universe’s superstars.
Prompt words today are remote, collaborate, lesson, course and snake.
Strangely enough, no matter how many times I center this poem, every other stanza wants to separate itself from the stanzas that precede and follow it. Strangely enough, it echoes the theme, so instead of trying to center it for the third time, I am just going to leave it as is.
Ocean Airs
The surf and sand we fell down on—
a bed provided by the sea
that smoothed the sheets we lay upon.
Those stories spun out by your tongue
slipped out of you through parted lips—
portals through which your life was sung.
Letter, syllable and word
was carried by the power of breath—
each a lovely soaring bird.
How did they know to find their way
to one who coveted their sound—
their whisper and their plaintive bay?
That night stretched out upon the beach,
finally, we fell to rest
and tell our stories without speech.
For the dVersePoets Pub, we were to write a poem of tercets, using three of these sets of words as ends to lines. I broke the rules and used all five.
SPEECH REST BEACH
ON SEA UPON
WORD BREATH BIRD
WAY SOUND BAY
SUNG LIPS TONGUE
Lazy Feet
Crossing the room or traversing the plain,
one foot goes in front of the other again.
It is the business of shoe after shoe
to follow each other through sand, dirt or goo.
They have easy going through fields filled with clover,
but when they meet something they have to climb over,
their task is much harder. No reflecting or browsing,
for climbing up hills is ten times more rousing.
They pump up the blood, these mountains and ramps.
They irritate arches and instigate cramps.
They cause blisters, pulled muscles, and wear a girl out.
That’s why I don’t often saunter about.
You won’t often find me walking out there
with the wind to my back and stirring my hair.
For although there’s less scenery, I do not care.
I prefer bed or hammock or chair.
Prompt words today are something, browse, revenge, traverse and business.
The Prize
Our weekends at the cabin were vacations we adored,
for our grandpa and our grandma made sure that we weren’t bored.
Every single Saturday, they sent us on a quest.
I always set out on my own for I feared that the rest
would take credit for the fact that I’d found the strangest thing
that our grandparents had set the task for each of us to bring.
Those times out on my own were a relief from the noise
from all the squealing little girls and all the shouting boys,
for the numbers of my cousins— all those brothers and those sisters—
pounded on my eardrums ’til I feared that they’d make blisters.
I hated all the folderol, for I preferred the calm.
The quiet sounds of nature acted as a balm.
The whispering of treetops and the music of the loons
were a contrast to the cowboy movies and the Looney tunes
streaming from the playroom where the television
was another thing that prompted my decision
that I could best seek treasure on a solitary search,
and, indeed, I found it in the shadows of a birch—
an eye that looked out at me from the darkness and the gloom
like the only thing alive within a haunted room.
I freed it with my pocketknife—too large for my pocket.
Too large for grandpa’s “thing” box, let alone for grandma’s locket.
What is it? I’m not going to tell where I found the eyes
one of which won me that week’s treasure prize!
Prompt words today are calm, cabin, quest, hate.
I’m also including my photo for the What is it? prompt.
Check List for a Budding Poet
If you want to be prolific,
better that you be specific,
and when you choose to state each fact,
try to make each word exact.
Don’t use time-worn words or wilted.
Avoid pretentious words or stilted.
Never try to force a rhyme.
Do not fail to take the time
to make your lines scan smoothly for,
uneven meter is a bore.
Words written for effect are hollow,
but where heart is, the head will follow.
So write your poetry from the heart.
Put your horse before the cart
and let it pull you up the hill.
Let your words express their will—
you following blindly, just to see
what the next line wants to be.
Let words of different shapes and sizes
furnish pleasure and surprises.
Make your poems resemble zoos
of striped okapis and kangaroos.
Delight yourself and then your reader.
Follow words, then be their leader
by whipping them in line and order,
shaping them within your border.
It never is too late to change
an errant line that’s out of range,
but editing is not what you
initially should seek to do.
Words give hearts tongues to share their pleasure
and their pain in equal measure.
Essayists and authors strive
to make their writings come alive.
They show us where their minds have been,
but poets put the music in.
Please click on the title above so WP will reformat the poem into its intended shape. For some reason The Reader always left margin justifies and this poem needs to be centered.
Camouflage
A man is bending his wife—
melding their shadows with the green forest.
They do not listen
to the nearby cannon’s roar––
will not imagine
that their life together,
so new,
might
not
stretch
into
the
future.
When he looks at his pocket watch,
someday children
ringing a well-stocked table
vanish in
her imagination.
He lifts his musket to his shoulder,
trying to believe
in a future
and in it,
this memory:
two shadows
joined as one,
invisible against
the forest wall.
Prompt words today are green, bend, shadow, cannon and memories.
Feast and Famine
More is less,
I have heard.
I take another bite of chocolate,
starting more of me.
I keep getting fatter,
tasting delicious
love in my cheeks,
on my tongue.
It nibbles at my teeth.
My dental bills send my dentist to Singapore.
I floss more between my teeth.
I don’t listen
when other people discuss their diets.
It is painful
filling cavities with food.
It gets hard to sit in theaters,
my stomach pressing against my chest.
People ask if I am pregnant.
I say yes.
I am giving birth to more of me.
Meanwhile, I’m a good listener.
People eat my ears up,
take big chunks of them.
I can grow more.
Right now,
this third croissant
is going to my ear.
The next will grow me
more tongue, bigger lips.
When you notice and inquire,
I’m going to tell you stories
that will wind around your skinny waist
like snakes or punk belts,
coil over coil.
This mouth has blistered
in the sun of Africa
in countries now starving.
Well, they were even starving then.
And children sat very close
and learned the words I pointed to.
In the market,
women taught the words
that my mouth needed
to buy their goods.
This is what I bought
in Bati market
on those three hills
where the desert caravans
would wind,
where the high black breasts jutted,
where the scarred faces sought beauty.
In the red dryness,
I bought a silver beaded marriage necklace for myself.
An old woman offered it.
I thought she had done with it, it was such a bargain.
Years later, looking through my photographs,
I saw my necklace on the neck of a young girl––
her bride price purchased for ten dollars.
I never wear it.
It is so beautiful
and I am growing larger
to feel more ashamed.
I bought also:
lemons, string and wooden beads,
embroidered strips to make a belt of,
Lalibela crosses out of brass,
Shawls as thin as gauze,
a bride dress to be packed away,
camel dung chips for my fire.
On the dead television
in the other room,
some nights they show worlds
that are not strange to me.
Things haven’t changed that much,
though fewer die now than back then.
I’m not insensitive. I send money
I send money
I send money
but it’s never enough.
What I want to send back
is the necklace.
Too late. That young girl is dead,
buried in a woman forty years older.
I eat for her grandchildren.
I imagine their bellies
swelling with the food I eat for them.
I can hardly ever eat enough.
Picture taken at Bati Market, Ethiopia, 1973
For the dVerse Poets challengeto write about some hidden part of ourselves–something we would ordinarily not talk about.
Family Feud
A skin of wine, flagon of malt
were meant to alter the gestalt
of a relationship gone wrong
and left to fester for too long.
It was meant to be a gift
left at a door to seal a rift—
a treasure left there in the dust
to heal a wound and restore trust.
But battles don’t so easily end.
A sincere gift may just offend.
Too much whiskey, too much wine
do not prompt reason when they combine.
They render one less than astute.
No offering of peace will suit
one determined to find fault
and so the feuding did not halt.
Prompt words today are trust, combine, gift, battle and suit.
image by Peter Forster on Unsplash, used with permission
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 