Category Archives: Poem

Ocean Airs

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                        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

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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

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Version 2

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

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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.

 

For dVerse Poets “List Poem” Prompt

Camouflage

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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

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                     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.

 

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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

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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

Practice Makes Perfect

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Practice Makes Perfect

His patience in predicament has become legendary—
a necessary attribute in one so prone to marry.
He tolerated petulance in the child bride
married out of loneliness after his first wife died.
He tried to build her confidence, but finally set her free,
realizing what she needed most was liberty.
His third wife used another means to put him to the test,
running up his credit cards while feathering his nest.
His fourth wife played around, and the kin of number five
turned his peaceful home into a frantic humming hive.
Only in his dotage did he finally meet his prize—
not as stunning in her beauty, but lovely in his eyes.
No grand faults to overlook. No predicaments to fix.
No petulance to deal with. No relatives to nix.
Marriage done at any age can be pleasure or blight,
but  when he married in his eighties, he finally got it right!!

 

Prompts for today are tolerate, predicament, nest, legendary and confidence. Photos by JD Mason on Unsplash, used with permission.

Night Owl

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Night Owl

With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––

I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a momentary interlude.

When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.

Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.

 

For the Early Bird or Night Owl Prompt.

The Great Unquoted

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The Great Unquoted

Folks from the country are rarely surveyed.
They’re too far from the action so rarely waylaid
by people with surveys or long questionnaires
who don’t know the difference between bulls and mares.

They’re afraid of  rogue bulls (or perhaps they are steers?)
Then wood ticks and snakes are additional fears.
So they’re given to mutiny when asked to go
to where they consider the folks are so slow

that they’re dumb as the fence posts  that border the road.
They aren’t up on the lingo. Their clothes aren’t in mode,
but farm folks are happy no matter what season.
If they’d taken a survey, they’d find the top reason

is that folks armed with clip boards don’t haunt every nook.
They don’t stand at the corner or invade your brook
when a fellow stands fishing and thinking great thoughts.
They don’t snoop in your garbage or peek in your pots.

Here in the country, while working or drinking, 
we keep to ourselves all the thoughts we are thinking.
Let city folks keep all their lists, charts and numbers.
We county folk prefer our bucolic slumbers.

Prompt words today are afraid, top, country, mutiny and post. And for dVerse Poets Open Link.

He might look like a city boy, but that’s my dad stretched out under a tree down by the river, thinking great thoughts. I think my mom had him dressed up for a church picnic.