New Wisdom from Old
Words copied from the I Ching
turn new eyes to everything.
Propped up on her vanity,
they preserve her sanity.
for dVerse Poets Tanaga Challenge.
Tanaga for dVerse Poets: New Wisdom from Old
13 Replies
Category Archives: Poem
Plethora
Plethora
How I love umbrellas! When I see them in the store,
frequently, I buy one, thinking I could use one more.
At the entrance to my casa, there is a jardiniere
with umbrellas tucked inside it, conveniently near.
All the long dry season, they sit shoulder to shoulder
waiting for the weather to get rainier and colder.
I see them in my passing and give each one a pat.
When the time comes that I need one, I’ll know where they are at!
The thunder comes at midnight. Wild lightning cracks the sky.
I see it all around me from the bedroom where I lie.
The rain comes down in torrents, but perhaps it will abate
by the time I leave tomorrow for my breakfast date.
If not, I know umbrellas stand ready at the door.
I can always use one, for that is what they’re for!
Until then, I watch the lighting flash, the drapery’s wild billow .
The dogs whine at the lightning. The cat curls on my pillow.
When morning dawns with raindrops beating a barrage,
I’m in need of an umbrella for my sprint to the garage.
All the trees are dripping and the rain’s still coming down.
So I need a big umbrella to protect my hair and gown.
I grab a likely candidate and draw it from the jar
like a sword pulled from a scabbard, but I don’t get very far.
It seems I can’t unfurl it. Its opener is stuck
and when I try to force it, I find I’m out of luck.
The next one lacks a handle, the third misses two spines.
The hall fills with frantic curses, my grumbles and my whines.
Where can all my umbrellas be now that they’re finally needed?
The one that shows the Eiffel tower? The one so finely beaded?
One loaned to Yolanda, another in the car,
one given to the old man who had so very far
to trudge up on the mountain in the driving rain.
There’s always one umbrella more, yet now I search in vain.
I grab the last umbrella, but it won’t fit through the door.
If it’s too wide to fit through it, then what is it good for?
Finally, I make a dash without the aid of shelter.
My shoulders soaked, my glasses fogged, my hair blown helter-skelter.
In my journey through the garden, the rain does not abate.
I dodge around the soggy dogs and wrestle with the gate.
When I reach the refuge of my car, I refuse to feel down.
I’ll just buy a new umbrella when I get to town!
(jdb photos. To open umbrellas wider, click on any one.)
The prompt today is frantic.
Morning Alarm Clock
Waiting for breakfast.
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Morning Alarm Clock
First the ghoulish yowl of cat.
Then the dogs’ accompanying scat.
The far off whine of the machine
that whines the gardener’s routine.
With creak of valve and scrape of tool,
water streams into the pool.
This water surging from the jet
completes my waking up quartet.
Yolanda’s key turns in the door,
adding one harmony more.
Her music joins the morning’s set
to swell it into a quintet.
What finer way to stir one’s head
on alternate mornings, here in bed?
The prompt is quartet.
dVerse Poets Pub: Silly Fashion
Silly Fashion
July to March, April to June,
stir your boredom with a spoon.
Use a pot to brew your passion.
Clothe yourself in timely fashion.
Wear a bagel as a hat.
Steam up the air, water the cat.
Do what you must to pass the day,
for all things pass too soon away.
Quick Change
Quick Change
This modern world has changed and changed
until I have become estranged.
These alterations make me dizzy.
I do not like my world so busy.
The young are used to change, it’s true.
They love the instant and the new.
Texts and sound bites come so fast.
Nothing’s really built to last.
But, for someone over fifty,
all this change is hardly nifty.
When at each end the candle’s burned,
when everything we’ve newly learned,
when everything that we hold dear
turns obsolete within one year,
we’re always slightly out of gear,
which makes us feel unjustly queer.
They make these changes without a clue.
Let’s start out minor, then work up to
the major things they’ve set askew:
(I will not mention Dr. Who.)
Every computer becomes its clone.
I cannot use the telephone.
My applications change so quick
that I have come to feel I’m thick.
Skype makes its changes overnight.
(Yet rarely ever improves the site.)
Microsoft Word just loves to change,
which leaves her users feeling strange.
Move this to there and that down here;
so all my mental powers, I fear,
are spent in figuring out the APP
and organizing a mental map
of how to write instead of what,
creating one big mental glut.
No room for creativity.
No safe place where our minds soar free.
We’re always “searching” for, instead,
our minds caught up in fear and dread
of where they’ve moved the enlarge bar to
in this week’s Word processing zoo!
Our e-mail servers have joined the plot.
I feel like pitching out the lot.
Just when I’ve learned most every trick
of tool and contact, every lick—
their Machiavellian, evil team
goes and changes the whole darn scheme!
But when we’re sending coast-to-coastal,
the alternative is going postal.
So though we bitch and though we frown,
they are the only game in town;
and so they have us where they want us.
Though they frustrate, ire and daunt us,
one after another, they are the same,
playing at this modern game
of change for change’s sake, it’s true.
There’s really nothing much to do.
So I submit, though in a tizzy,
I’ll relax less and keep real busy.
I’ll leave the cyber world alone
and concentrate on just one bone
I have to pick in this modern world,
and I say this with my top lip curled.
Max Factor, Revlon, Almay, please—
I kneel before you on my knees.
Leave the lipstick colors that we hold dear
alone! Don’t change them every year.
Each time you cancel one that’s zesty,
to find another makes us testy!!!
I admit.. Repost of a poem from four years ago. Admit it, you didn’t even remember it did, you? I certainly didn’t. The prompt today is micro.
Michoacan: In a Time of War
Water Park—Uruapan, Michoacan, 2003 jdb photo 
Talisman
Talisman
Token from a loved one. A protective charm.
A fetish or an amulet worn at neck or arm.
Luck is what it brings you if it’s working right.
Iridescent courage glowing in the night.
Signet ring or pendant inscribed with hidden power
Melts away the terrors of the midnight hour.
As an absent loved one in a far off land
Nestles very close here, in a clutching hand.
-
The prompt word today is talisman.
Outsmarting My Smart TV
My TV is Smarter Than I Am
My TV is smarter than I am, springing to life on a whim.
When my Jack-of-all-trades comes to work here, I think she is flirting with him.
She flicks on and then off in a second, just like she has given a wink.
Or perhaps registers disapproval by shutting us off with a blink.
I know she has much to complain of since I purchased her two years ago.
I’ve never connected to cable or dish, so she doesn’t have too much to show.
Although she connects to computers, my Apple igores that she’s here.
That I haven’t read the instructions? I know it’s exceedingly queer.
She’s equipped to show movies in 3D, but my housekeeper threw out the glasses.
So if I want movies to jump out at me, I must go view them out with the masses
and not in the privacy of my own home with my cat or myself or my friends.
I haven’t checked out buying more on the Web, and for this I must soon make amends.
My computer is usually my viewer of choice when my friend sends me movies by Skype.
The films that he sends are amazing. He knows the best subjects and type
of videos that I like viewing. They are smart and they’re funny and Indie.
He doesn’t send action/adventure or slapstick or horror or Hindi.
But I never watch them on my Smart screen, preferring my laptop to it.
I set it right there at my poolside and watch as I try to get fit
doing my pool aerobics for an hour and a half, maybe two.
My workouts just seem to last longer whenever I’ve something to view.
My TV can see out the window that I’m faithful to screens that are small
and I’m sure that I’ve given a complex to my big gal I don’t watch at all.
So I started a “Last Sunday” film night where I can share films that I savor
We eat and we drink and we talk and we laugh as we all view the movies I favor.
For one night a month, my TV springs to life when I plug in the little thumb drive.
Her face flushes up in an enormous blush, for she sees that I know she’s alive.
The eyes of all eight of us fix upon her. She’s the center of all our attention.
We laugh at her jokes and cry at her pathos. Respond to her mysteries with tension.
But the rest of the month her expression is blank, sitting alone in her corner
looking so sad and so lacking in life that I feel that perhaps I should mourn her.
The first time she lit up when I entered the room to say she didn’t recognize me,
I realized with shock for the very first time that my TV could both talk and see!
I hadn’t quite realized the extent of her powers when I bought her at Costco that day.
My old TV weighed in at five hundred pounds—more than a TV should weigh.
I’d inherited it from my mom when she died so I had a personal attachment,
but to move it alone, one risked heart attack or at least a vertebral detachment.
And so I gave in to cajoling by friends that it was time to buy another.
and I gave away the monster TV that I had acquired from my mother.
But guilt has suffused me ever after that day, for I really don’t need a TV,
and this smart girl is lacking in challenges, just wasting her talents on me.
She’s recently started to turn herself on (something that girls alone do)
and talking to me when I enter the room and enter her angle of view.
Finally I just unplugged her—an act of most selfish defiance.
I haven’t the time in my life just to chat—especially to an appliance!
Hate to admit this poem is an edited version of one written over three years ago and I still flounder around trying to work this TV. The world has evolved beyond me. I should be the one blushing! The prompt today is blush.
Confessions of a Line-Crasher.
Confessions of a Line-Crasher
Patience is not my forte. I put it on a shelf
and withdraw my impatience. It better suits myself.
I do not enjoy waiting for my turn in a store,
and bank lines make me want to barrel for the door.
I will not take a number when going out to dine.
I do not get my jollies from standing in a line.
Pharmacies and waiting rooms are simply not for me.
Let alone the airport queues when I’ve a need to pee.
If patience is a virtue, I fear I’ve flunked the test,
I think it is my birthright to go before the rest!!!
The prompt today was patience.
Those Time-killin’, Prescription-fillin’, Amoxicillin Blues
Judy and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day, #2
(Those Time-killin’, Prescription-fillin’, Amoxicillin Blues)
For one long week, I wait and wait
for this cold to dissipate,
but such is not to be my fate.
Although it seems like it’s abating,
instead, it’s simply incubating.
It’s only here to agitate.
It has me in a constant state
of paroxysm. At this rate,
I’ll cough myself to heaven’s gate!
By what means may I eradicate
this uninvited guest I hate?
I steal its covers, palpitate,
disturb its sleep, excoriate
its surfaces and mentholate.
I leave doors open just to bait
its exit, and I educate
myself in methods to end this date–
wild to finally give the gate
to this unwelcome reprobate.
Unrested, shaking, light of head,
I pull myself out of my bed,
strip off my fevered dressing gown,
to make the long drive into town
to see my doctor for my check,
climb up the stairs, a wheezing wreck,
on time. But doctor’s one hour late!
As I sit and ruminate,
I fall into a sorry state,
thinking I need to educate
them on the way they operate.
I see the doc and hit the door.
As I drive to the Walmart store,
of energy, I have no more.
Fighting just to stay upright,
it feels like I’ll be here all night.
When one man cuts in front of me,
I’d like to give his back the knee,
but I resist and live with it.
Yet I admit i have a fit
when one more woman cuts the line.
I tell the druggist the turn is mine.
She bags my pills and I am off
with dripping nose and awful cough
due to my cold as well as strep,
shaking, dizzy, slow of step.
I make it to my car and drive
home through the traffic’s busy hive.
One hour, if I’m not mistaken,
it takes to drive what should have taken
twenty minutes. I’ve not been fed,
or medicated, yet take to bed
the very minute that I get
back home, fatigued and soaking wet.
Two hours later I awake
to discover the mistake.
When that pharmaceutic villain
dosed out my amoxicillin,
she didn’t get the dosage right—
plus—I was 20 capsules light!
What’s more, she’d kept the damn prescription!
Yes. I threw a small conniption
fit. I couldn’t order more
from any pharmaceutic store
without the script. And, as I’d supposed,
my doctor’s clinic was now closed!!!!!
That’s how, my friends, my day has gone
since I awakened with the dawn
after a few hours tossing sleep.
Read of it now and mourn and weep
over those pills sorely mis-boughten
by one who lies here feeling rotten!!
True story, un-exaggerated in terms of how utterly rotten I was feeling. Yes, it’s strep and the doctor is trying to ward off pneumonia, thus the second round of heartier antibiotics. which I’m going to have to put off taking at least another day until some kind friend (John?) goes into town and gets me a new prescription and the correct pills. The prompt today was incubate.
