Bird Bath
You bask in the sun as you crane to inspect
that bird in the water, demanding respect.
How odd that he has not one thing to say
and as you caw your challenge, doesn’t fly away.
When you bob your head at him, he bobs at you.
He’s an image of everything you choose to do.
Then, Mr. Raven, as you fly away,
So too does the other decide not to stay.
Just as you stage your sudden defection,
flying away with you is your reflection.
The One Word Sunday prompt is reflection.
When she wears it, worlds collide.
Men collect on either side.
Women seek her company.
Children seek to grace her knee.
Potentates, senators, kings
bring her necklaces and rings.
Scholars write her name in books.
Jealous women exchange looks.
There is hardly anything
that nature does not seek to bring.
Winds blow harder, streams divert
when she wears that saffron skirt.
The very heavens note where she went.
Tsunamis curl, volcanoes vent.
Soldiers line up to parade.
Mimes begin their mute charade.
Actors emote better to
this goddess in her sunny hue.
Mourning doves just bill and coo.
Old boyfriends seek her out anew.
Yet as she stands before her glass,
surveying both her front and ass,
her mate says, “Are you wearing that?”
and she surmises she looks too fat.
As she changes into basic black,
the lava cools, the seas hold back.
Her suitors cease their clamoring press.
She does not wear the yellow dress.
The dVerse Poets prompt was lemon yellow.
Puddle-Jumping
Raindrops fall and splat and skitter,
bringing sheen and gloss and glitter.
In my dreams I hear them falling,
try to wake to heed their calling.
When exactly do I know
it’s time to leave my bed and go
outside to splash in rain-filled gutters,
ignoring Grandpa’s warning mutters
that I’ll catch a cold today
if I go outside to play?
He says it’s raining cats and dogs,
but all I find outside are frogs,
proving his idiom a lie
as nothing’s falling from the sky
but rain and blossoms from the tree
that stretches its limbs over me.
I make my way, laborious,
through mud and goo most glorious,
then reach the ditch and wash feet off
in the rushing water trough.
I see Grandpa watching me,
warm and dry and splatter-free.
But then he’s gone, no doubt to see
what’s playing now on the TV.
But, just as it begins to pour,
there’s Grandpa coming out the door!
Barefooted, he jumps in my puddle,
gives my shoulders a warm cuddle,
then repeats the old refrain
that this day is “Right as rain!”
For RDP the prompt is Gloss
Intimacies
Remember that delicious
walking, arms linked,
down the middle
of the gravel road
in your pajamas
at five in the morning
when you were twelve?
That first slumber party
in your safe small town
when you all stayed up all night
for the first time in your lives?
That eerie first sight
of the sun coming up
when your head had never hit a pillow
since it went down?
And then you knew for the first time
the delicious pleasures
of being a night owl—
of finding time
that everyone else was wasting
through dreams.
And you have been
an aficionado of night
ever since.
All of your term papers
and exams studied for
at the last minute,
all night long.
Books written, poems written
mostly in the dark
while towns and cities around you slept.
That power of having all of your time for yourself
with not a chance of phones ringing.
Some magic happening
once you had the world to yourself
so ever afterwards
you have survived
on as little sleep as possible.
During your party years,
dancing and drinking till three,
then going for breakfast with the single crowd
and driving straight to school at six.
You were invulnerable.
Even married,
sneaking out of bed once he’d fallen asleep
and working in your basement studio all night long,
sometimes sneaking back to bed before he awakened,
at other times caught.
“It’s nine in the morning! Have you been up all night again?”
Feeling that little terror, like a vampire caught by light.
Then at 54, with no more husband,
no more job necessary,
with a new country and a new studio
above ground,
guilty pleasures no longer needed to be hidden—
watching light after light go out
as you sat piecing art together
in your studio—until suddenly,
impossibly,
light after light went on again
so you were going to bed
as your neighbor was arising
to start his day.
Then, improbably, at 62, internet romance
entered your midnight-and-after world.
Every night serenaded to sleep
from 1500 miles away
by an equally night-addicted lover bard
at two or three or four a.m.—
or whenever pillow talk led to it.
Skype became your love letters
and your trysting spot
now and then all day long;
but still, night better swaddled
that intimate invisible union
through the dark air
that has always been magic for you,
but which now joins instead of
sending you into the single space
where you unite with that within you
which you keep separate from the world.
At night, united or alone,
you know exactly what it is you want
and live it,
with no world
to lead you elsewhere.
For dVerse Poets we are to write about a moment of intimacy. I wrote about a number of them…and then, the ultimate. Unfortunately, I looked through photos for an hour and couldn’t find the right illustration. If you have an idea for one you’d like to donate, I’d like to consider it!
Can you furnish a better story for this photo for me? HERE is the pingback to include with your post to make sure we all see it.
Short Short Story
No place for a nap could be crasser or baser.
It’s clear that that beer was simply a chaser.
Overly tired, three sheets to the wind,
I think that this fellow is overly ginned!
Origins
Does our legacy lie buried in altars far below
or in the sky above us in that universal glow
leaving signals of its visits in the shadows of those scars
that are the vestiges of planets or of stars
left by burning meteors that spin their gleaming trains
across the sky before they bury what remains
deep in the earth to rustle and come to rest in earth
and perhaps seed vestiges of an alien birth
so our world thus mimics some world that gleams above.
As we gaze at the heavens, training our thoughts on love,
do we intuit tender mercies that were our beginnings?
Are those specks of stardust our true underpinnings?
Our scientific knowledge breeds pollution and cancer
without ever really giving us an answer
as to what man’s origin was in the beginning
and what led us away from it and to our present sinning.
For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 707, May 18 2025 the words are: legacy scars altar sky mercy burn mimic rustle gleam gaze shadows train
Last Straw
I’d make conversation but my upper plate
seems to be grinding my lower of late.
I fear there’s a fissure that’s preventing their matching
and somehow my back teeth just seem to be catching
and locking which creates a problem in chewing,
so eating’s another thing I won’t be doing.
I’m bungling everything done by my jaws.
At talking and eating I’m taking a pause.
For now I’ll just listen and watch you eat pie.
If you give me a straw, I’ll simply get by
by sipping my tea and nodding my head
in avid agreement with everything said.
I could have stayed home and stared at the wall,
but I couldn’t face not seeing y’all,
so I will just sit here and soak in the news,
forsaking my own chance to thrill and amuse.
Until I’ve seen my dentist, you’ll just have to wait
for the juicy story I was going to relate!
The SOCS prompt this week is “straw.”
My childhood dollhouse was a helium balloon,
caught in a tornado with a flock of flying squirrels,
equal novices in these midnight adventures
soaring out into the world away from horses,
wheat fields, henhouses and unpaved roads.
Escape was a constant theme in that jumprope, hopscotch life
where costumes were for Halloween and dreams kept silent under wigs.
Sailing rainwater rivers down deep ditches,
wearing vestigial vernix as protection against inevitable dunkings,
my uncle’s porkpie hat my umbraculum against hot prairie skies.
The only exit from that world I escaped in time was too often an ossuary:
tunafish Catholics buried under Papal supervision in one part of the cemetery,
Methodists in another, lily-white in their observance of the rules:
Sunday morning church a prerequisite for Saturday night dances.
Jazz nights under covers, Jesus Loves me in the light of day.
Inner tube boats traded for planes and ocean liners,
orange juice traded for absinthe, I sailed and flew into the world.
Using my first world as a grounding place,
I seized chance’s fortune as well as its mistakes––
to venture out and earn a life.
Image by Alireza Dolati
Divine Providence
The wings of destiny are stilled, waiting for our play.
Astonished at our slowness, confused at the delay.
Disappointment in mankind by now’s a usual thing.
What new human horror will the future bring?
We’ve poisoned oceans, sullied air and burdened earth with junk.
Enough to put Ma Nature in a perpetual funk.
She balks and sends out warriors to try to curb our lusts,
but still mankind continues to turn shouldn’ts into musts.
She now sees she was misguided in creating human fools,
with all of their excesses flaunting all her rules.
Soon she’ll find another way to try to clear her slate of them
as destiny stands waiting to see what is the fate of them.
For dVerse Poets, we were to choose a Spanish term to use for the subject of a poem. In Spanish, Divina Providencia means destiny with choices and spiritual interventions. My poem is about how mankind has unfortunately chosen to respond to that divine providence.
The Passenger
I see her back her car outside.
She never offers me a ride.
I go the same way she is going,
but she passes, still unknowing.
After ten long years, I stand
making no sign with head or hand.
My legs are tired. My back is bent.
My footsteps follow where she went.
It takes two minutes to go by car.
I take an hour to go that far.
If she knew, perhaps she’d say,
“Would you like a ride today?”
She would have rolled her window down
to offer me a ride to town.
I’d dust my clothes and step inside,
grateful, at long last, for the ride.
And at the bottom of the hill,
as though, perhaps, she’d had her fill,
She’d say, “I’m turning left from here.”
And I’d assemble all my gear,
and give my thank-you, even though
I need to go where she will go.
Charity goes just so far,
I think, as I exit the car.
I live about two-thirds of the way up a very tall mountain in Mexico, and often as I drive down to the main road, I give a ride to whomever I encounter walking down the cobblestones—especially the women, most of whom work as housekeepers in the houses in my fraccionamiento. But now and then when I am in a hurry or when I see a man suspicious-looking or dusted by his labors, I drive on by. Then I wonder what he is thinking as I guiltily observe him in the rear vision mirror.
The Word of The Day Challenge today is passenger. Forgottenman found this poem I published long ago and suggested I used it for this prompt. He knows I am exhausted. Sweet, sweet man. Here it is.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 