Category Archives: Poem

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts

We’ve brought your breakfast tray for we know that you’ve been restive,
but now we’d like to urge you to try to feel more festive.
Will you remain forever, questioning and forlorn
because you could not go downstairs on your wedding morn?
You cannot stay much longer in this sealed-off room.
The wedding guests are gathering. It’s time to jump the broom.

Jumping the broom is a time-honored wedding tradition in which the bride and groom jump over a broom during the ceremony. The act symbolizes a new beginning and a sweeping away of the past, and can also signify the joining of two families or offer a respectful nod to family ancestors.

Prompts today are wedding, stairs, urge, tray and festive.

Knees, Please

Think of all the things you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t have knees!

(Click on photos to enlarge.)


Knees, Please

Knees, knees, folks have knees
from Katmandu down to Belize.
In Peru, where they ride llamas,
they still have knees in their pajamas.
Further north, up where it freezes,

even Polar bears have kneezes.


Knees, knees, folks have knees
to ogle, fondle, pet and squeeze.
(It’s easy when they’re under kilts.)
Some knees on roller skates or stilts
are scabbed and scaly, skinned and sore,

but still they know what they are for.


Knees are great to bounce a baby
to kick a soccer ball, or maybe
to bend in prayer when they’re in church,
or form a perfect sort of perch
for lovelorn boys on bended knee

to ask girls, “Will you marry me?”


Knees, knees, folks have knees
In sun they burn, in snow they freeze.
Yet knees can cross and knees can knock
Knees can jog you round the block.
Knees are handy and dependable.

And aren’t we glad that knees are bendable?

 

Matin for Patella


When begging, kicking,
flower picking,
shooting marbles, playing jacks,
checking out important facts
in books that live on lower shelves,
checking under beds for elves
and asking for a loved one’s hand,
you should never, never stand.
Instead, place one bent leg or more
solidly upon the floor
and as you kneel with grace and ease,

please thank the Lord for making knees!

 

This whole sequence was inspired by the first photo of little girls in the kids’ choir that performed at our Christmas party. I then remembered these silly poems I wrote years ago…and started looking for other knee photos. One hour later, here they are!  In the meantime, someone has been knocking insistently on my gate..although it is 11:30 P.M., so I called the guardhouse and had a security car drive by. The knocking stopped right after I called and no one is out there. Dogs weren’t barking. No telling what it was…..but knuckles, not knees were involved. (Putting in my tags, I see that one has already been done for “poem about knees” so perhaps I’ve run this before. Oh well. We can all read it again if we make it that far…

Venus in the Year 2020

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Venus in the Year 2020

She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.

She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.

From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.

She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.

She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.

Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.

With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.

She
stands.

 

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Respite

Version 2

Respite

Although it is the day lit world that shouts at me, it seems
that when darkness closes, you echo in my dreams.

 

For dVerse Poets: Echo

Hearth

Hearth

That vacant place in my heart.
That pool missing from the ocean.

If the purpose of life
is to live it,
why all the fuss and bother?
Why the wars and thievery?
Why the empty heart?
Is it the law of supply and demand?
Peace more treasured when a rarity?
Love more precious surrounded by hate?
Let us make a little cave here in this place
where no one else wants to be.
Let us take pleasure and do no harm.
Let us fill up the oceans of our hearts
and pray that the world with all its problems
keeps its distance.

Prompts for today are vacant, live, ocean, purpose and pool.

Wardrobe Change

Image by Ivan Dodig on Unsplash. Used with permission

Wardrobe Change

Her sequined dress, once fabulous, has lost its shape and glitter.
It lies beneath her window, reduced to roadside litter.
She might have been more charitable—donating the gown.
They could have earned a pretty penny for a dress of such renown.
But she needs its story ended. She could not bear to face
another woman’s body and another woman’s face
pictured in the tabloids in that gown made just for her.
Its memories running through her mind, quickly, in a blur.

Trips down long red carpets, the flashbulbs and the fuss.
Minding how she sat so its gathers would not muss.
How its beauty cut into the soft mounds of her flesh.
The sharp knives of its edges. The fine silk of its mesh.
The fusing of those opposites—the pleasure and the pain.

His gentle kiss, but how, at last, he left her once again.
The lovely words once spoken that turned out to be just script.
The dress tugged off in anger. The dress she’d pulled and ripped

to be free of all it brought to mind—the glamour and the pain.
Best it be diminished by harsh sun and rain.
She flung it out the window, not caring where it rested.
Rid of it, would painful memories be bested?
Covered up by road dust, bogged down by stormy weather,
sequins floated gutters, each weightless as a feather.
Threads loosened and seams parted as the garment ceased to be—
its combined pains and pleasures consigned to memory.

Prompt words today are charitable, litter, fabulous and dress.

Opening Night at the Theater with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

photo by Jordhan Madec on Unsplash. Used with permission

Opening Night at the Theater
with a Famous Screen Legend’s Guest Appearance

There’s an air of raw excitement in the theater tonight.
The ingenues are nervous and the grand dame wants to fight.
Her makeup isn’t done right and her hairdo is a fright.
The set is way too yellow and the stage lights are too bright!

She regales them with stories of when she was at her height.
They wonder just how many great successes she will cite.
It is a frosty evening, yet they brave the cold wind’s bite 
to stand out in the alley to escape the much worse plight

of the thirtieth retelling of the star’s first opening night.
The male lead finally gets here, but, alas, high as a kite.

The orchestra begins their opus, hoping to incite
the audience to wild applause as they get their first sight

of the famous lady, surrounded by pink light
that obscures those telltale wrinkles and a costume that’s too tight.
The ingenues are all in place, ready for the fight,
waiting for the star to speak, then exit to the right.

Then all their minor lines they are ready to recite.
It will be a war of words, and they’re ready to fight.
This era, it will be their turn the audience to excite.
Will they outshine the brightest star? Yes, perhaps they might!

Prompt words today are excitement, stage, frosty, regale and yellow.

Scrooge and Your Christmas Vacation

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Scrooge and Your Christmas Vacation

Scrooge has turned surfing waves to ice and ski slopes into water.
Now he’ll ruin the rest of Christmas for your son and daughter.
He’s hacked into Kris Kringle’s map and hijacked all the toys—
the dolls and basketballs of girls, the hockey sticks of boys.
He’s eaten all the cookies—just stuffed them in his face.
The mistletoe and holly? Vanished, without a trace.

Yes, Scrooge is up to his old tricks, spreading brimstone and acid
over all your Christmas plans that seemed so set and placid.
If you want to thwart him, take your surfboards to the slopes.
Go skiing at the oceanside. Ruin all his dark Scrooge hopes.
Make merry with no mistletoe. Traditions rearrange.
Give Santa Claus a hotdog. He’ll appreciate the change!

In our modern screwed-up world, we’ve gone a bit astray.
We’ve forgotten the real purpose behind our Christmas Day.
That first Christmas was as humble as a Christmas scene could be.
No holly and no mistletoe. Much less frivolity.
The original gifts of Christmas were not placed beneath a tree,
for those first gifts that were given were not meant for you and me.

How the message has been altered as it came down the years
is that Christmas is for getting and disappointed tears
if we don’t get what we wanted. Expectations of perfection.
When we think of giving, we don’t see our own reflection.
Perhaps Scrooge brings the point across that joy is in the living.
So instead of what you hoped you’d get, concentrate on giving!

 

Prompt words today are Scrooge, map, tasteful, placid and water.

Seaside Soliloquy

Seaside Soliloquy

Out beyond the breakers, you curl and curl and curl,
until you reach that breaking place where you start to unfurl.
Then you slap your underbelly on the sand’s soft lap.
Clap!
Before sneaking back and under, rolling back out there,
past a reef of coral, without a human care,
free again,
’til you begin
to curl and curl and curl.

 

For dVerse Poets, Apostrophe  (Apostrophe is a poetic device in which you address an inanimate object, animal or a person not present.)

On Display

On Display

He’s so ostentatious. He turns up his nose
at other folks’ houses, vehicles and clothes.
He only wears Lagerfeld, Lauren or Kors.
His decor is elegant, but he hates yours!

Your neighborhood barbecue starting at twilight
will never be his calendar’s highlight.
Picnics to him are truly the pits.
He dines at Spagos. Slums it at the Ritz.

In his microcosm, he reigns as the king
of all refinement. Each exquisite thing
that resides in his house is an objet d’art,
but, concerning your taste? Darling, don’t start.

When it comes to decor you have no idea.
He buys antiques in Paris. You shop at IKEA.
Of his sense of design, you know not one iota.
Do you need further proof? You drive a Toyota!

 

The prompt words today are microcosm, barbecue, twilight, ostentatious and nose. Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash