Category Archives: Poem

She Brings Us Together

13 Replies

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She Brings Us Together

She can’t solve this problem. She is falling to the cold.
Her strength in all this dying— a wonder to behold.
She must relinquish life, but she will not abandon humor.
In these few remaining weeks, she’ll be a joyful roomer
in this hospice where she’s finally been brought to reside 
by that shadowed companion who shuffles at her side.

Her children group around her. Old loves come to her aid.
As her ending’s written, her last decisions made,
her wit and love of living stay with her even now,
as though she is a beacon, directing us in how
to do this thing with dignity, joyful to the end.
Once more, we’re being guided by our loving friend.

IMG_5571

 

Prompts today are falling, solve, relinquish and cold.

 

Feeling Poorly

37 Replies

Shades of pumpkin face. What I look like!!!

I’ll do you the favor of not taking a selfie of my grotesquely swollen face. A 1 a.m. mad dash to hospital emergency last night did not seem to do anything to solve the problem so I need to be off again to try to find a solution after zero sleep last night. Poor, poor Pearl. What am I doing blogging? Just passing the hours until the lab and dentist office open up. Then another trip to a doctor to get results of blood tests. 

Feeling Poorly

The solution to my problem may be labeled as arcane,
for all attempts to solve it have been, alas, in vain.
I’ve visited three dentists but the jagged pain persists,
driven to emergency, gripping the wheel with fists
at 1 am, hoping that I’d soon be on the mend,
but alas is seems as though my pains aren’t going to end.

New antibiotics that have not as yet kicked in,
my pain pills ineffective, I cannot resort to gin.
Two teeth pulsing, face swollen from jaw to cheek to eye.
Skin pulled to the bursting point. I’m barely getting by.
With not one hour of sleep last night, I’d better catch a cab
to take me back to Ajijic for blood tests at the lab.

I’ve got to ask my dentist to try to fit me in,
but all-in-all my patience is wearing rather thin.
Once I’d grown accustomed to all my regular ills,
clear on how to treat them with my handy stash of pills,
it seems that Mother Nature is up to newer tricks.
Is messing with us humans the way she gets her kicks?

If she wants to pay us back for ills that we have done,
could she pick a guiltier target with whom to have her fun?
I’m trying to do right by her by cutting down on trash,
recycling all my plastics, my cardboard and my glass.
And I can give directions to Washington D.C.
so she can plague the guilty guys and lay off li’l ole me!

This is a poor excuse for a poem. Just can’t think of anything else at the moment as I wait for the medical world to awaken. I’ve had a miserable night.

Signs of a sad Halloween

Prompt words today are mend, regular, jagged, arcane and drive.

Blind Date

11 Replies

OldPaintDuckieSoulRedBlind Date

I’m idling at the stop light, irate at the delay.
Though your chatter is innocuous, my nerves begin to fray.

As I gun the engine, the car leaps from the ground.
Is there a single subject on which you won’t expound?

Every single statement hits another nerve
as the tires chew the road up and navigate the curve.

I finally reach your neighborhood and my spirits soar.
We say good night and I am gone before you reach your door.

As blind dates go, this was the worse. For sure, there’ll be no other.
Never again will I accept a line-up by my mother!

Today’s prompts are light, irate and innocuous.

Karma

8 Replies

Screen Shot 2019-10-25 at 9.22.14 AM.pngphoto by Darren Halstea, Unsplash. Used w/ permission

Karma

Can we extricate ourselves from all the evil we may we do,
or once we meet our maker will fate drop the other shoe
and will the evil we have done be visited on us?
On our journey to Nirvana, will we have missed the bus?

Will we be held accountable for all that we have done?
Once our life is over, will atonement have its fun?
Will there just be the help for us that we’ve given to others,
so our lack of mercy toward enemies and brothers
will be visited upon us, in spite of all our pleas—
past cruelties unfurled on us as we beg on our knees?

How many lifetimes will it take to extricate our being
from the fate we’ve set in motion? How long ’til we’ll be seeing
that the future ills we suffer are the ills we’ve done the world,
and in each evil act, our own future was unfurled.

Prompts this week are accountable, total, Karma, extricate and help.

Home Sweet Homeland

30 Replies

jdbphoto

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

Home Sweet Homeland

In homage to our homeland, we must keep it homogenous.
Protect it from the homeless, the homos and androgynous.
Being a homo sapien is not enough for entry.
To preserve our bonhomie, you must be white or gentry.
Now that you’ve ruined your homeland, must you come ruin ours?
Swarm across our boundaries? Infest our sacred towers?
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed” is seen as just a homily.
For the present powers-that-be, it’s only an anomaly.
America’s our “Home Sweet Home,” but it’s not meant for you.
We have no place for immigrants of your particular hue.

 

For the dVerse Poets prompt to write a poem making use of a Polyptoton. See other poems written to this prompt HERE.

Rubber Boots

9 Replies

Rubber Boots

All the flowers are crying, their petals streaming drops
inherited from rivers flooding over troughs
running up above them, collecting all the streams
that run down the roof top and across the beams.

The rainfall is most copious. It kisses windowpanes
with countless fractured raindrops, each falling where it deigns.
If this were not a school day, I’d run about outside.
This staying inside looking I cannot abide.

I’d rather splash in puddles, damming off the flood
with my rubber rain boots, crushing down the mud
to form private embankments to stem the rushing tide.
What an unfair punishment, this keeping me inside.

Reading, maths and spelling cannot hold my attention,
for I have these new rubber boots I am driven to mention.
I can’t wait ’til recess so I can try them out,
for in rainy weather, splashing’s what it’s about!!!!

 

Prompts today are “a flower cried,” school, crush, copious and kiss.

Photo Credits: Red boots by Rupert Brooks , blue boots by markus Spiske, both on Unsplash, used with permission.

dVerse Poets Pub: Answering Neruda

11 Replies

“Who sings in the deepest water in the abandoned lagoon?”
—Pablo Neruda

Answering Neruda

Who is the one who
sings my dreams here
in the velvet shade of
the river’s guardians ?

Deepest secrets are told here.

Water, the mother of us all,
in league with
the
abandoned voice of this
lagoon’s ministry.

 

 

For dVerse Poets Pub. See the challenge HERE.
Read more responses to the challenge HERE.

 

Indulgent Parents at the DMV

7 Replies

 

 

Indulgent Parents at the DMV

You’ve studied so hard and we’re screamingly proud.
You’ve done everything perfect, for crying out loud.

You’ve conquered the manual, drive in the dark,
avoiding pedestrians. Parallel park.

You knew all the signals for stopping and turning.
Looked perfectly calm, though your stomach was churning.

It’s such a travesty  you didn’t pass.
That inspector was prejudiced, ornery and crass.

Your driving test was perfect. Almost.
Anyone could have missed seeing that post!

 

Prompts today are travesty, scream, manual, loud and almost.

Grossed out by Liver

24 Replies

 

Image by JJ Jordan on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Grossed Out by Liver

Have you ever seen the quiver
of a plate of raw red liver?
Shake it and you’ll see it shiver.
Blood runs right out and forms a river.
If mom cooks it, I won’t forgive her.
I will not eat a gol darn sliver!! 

 

For Whimsygismo’s dVerse Quadrille (exactly 44 words) prompt of Quiver. Phew!!!

Hop Scotch (Don’t Worry. Be Happy!)

14 Replies

                       Click on photos to enlarge.

 

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                                  Hop
Scotch

                      “How green is blue?” the child asks,
“What is the taste of pink?”
                        A prodigy koan-master
 with a novel way to think,
                        such problems keep a child’s mind
engaged in matters other
                         than all the daily problems
of a father or a mother. 

                         No spider ever stumbles
when spinning out her strands,
                         for the feet she walks around on
are really only hands.
                         No specter of a problem
ever plagues a goat.
                          He simply feeds upon the world
and lives his life by rote.

                       And so it is with children.
They go from thing to thing
                      with no worries of the outcomes
that their acts might bring.
                       They leave to human adults
the worries of such things
                        and simply live with pleasures
that every new day brings.

Prompts for today are “How green is blue?” spider, stumble, specter and goat.