Category Archives: Poem

Hope

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IMG_5964Hope wears a white apron and a pensive smile!

Hope

I hope life turns out as you wish and is a bowl of cherries.
I hope you find a run of luck and that it never varies.
The whole world would be lucky, if I had my “druthers.”
Every line would catch a fish. All orphans would find mothers.
All endings would be happy.  All lottery tickets win.
But as I stop to think of it, I have to think again.
If all of us were winners, winning would lose its distinction.
Every hunter bagging game would lead to their extinction.
It seems that often one guy’s luck brings bad luck to another.
If you’re the family favorite, then it cannot be your brother!
So if I must express my hopes I guess that I’ll just say
I hope that when it is your turn, good luck will come your way!

Now I have to tell the story about my camera, which showed up missing (oxymoron) the day after I’d met friends in the Ajijic plaza coffee place.  I’d run a number of errands that day, and so after I had searched my house for over an hour, and my car, and my garden, I headed off for town.  Was it at the coffee place?  No.  Either of the stores I’d visited? No.  I headed down the street to Ajijic Tango, where I’d had comida with my friends.  All locked up.  Seeing a door ajar a few yards away from the entrance, I called into it.  It must be the kitchen.  I called and called and fially someone came.  I gave them a note asking the owner to call me.Then I went home.

A day or so ago I wrote about a friend in Missouri who tends to straighten out my life for me on a regular basis?  Well, I wrote to him bemoaning the fate of my camera.  Within the hour, he had sent me a link to a local message board and lo and behold–there was a picture of my living room with friends I’d invited to a viewing of the new documentary of another friend all sitting in it!  A picture that had been in my camera!  Turns out the lady pictured above had been approached by a man who tried to sell her a camera.  “He asked too much” she said in her message, which stated that when she’d inspected the camera, she had surreptitiously removed the sd card from the camera as well as three more in the pouch of the carrying case, then posted one of the pictures on the card in hopes of finding the owner.

Did she know the man who had the camera?  She did.  Long story short, she went to his house to ask about the camera.  Sadly, he reported, it had stopped working. (He still didn’t realize she’d taken the sd cards out. Brilliant move on her part.)  Did he still have the camera?  No, he had given it to his son, who, it turned out, worked in the restaurant next to where I must have lost my camera!  After a few more trips to enquire on her part, the next morning I recovered my camera from the son, giving him a good reward, although he didn’t ask.  I then recovered my four sd cards from the angel pictured above and gave her a reward as well, in spite of her protests.  And that is how my Music Man in Missouri once more came to my aid and turned disaster into luck.  (If you regularly read my blog, you might have guessed that I cannot survive without my camera.)  What does this story have to do with hope?  Simply that I hope if you ever lose anything dear to you that you have two angels  looking over you as I did!!!

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/hope/

Scar

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Scar

 

   All bear them                                          as badges of life.
Each marks a wound                               and then a healing.
Like most of life, good                 growing out of the bad,
producing proud new flesh to cover the inevitable
that we all face––the cut, the gore, the severing.
Life is arranged for some reason to complete
pain with healing, one way or the other.
Proud flesh, proud heart–an excess
in us all that needs smoothing.
First pain and then succor,
a generation dying and 
 another one growing. 
Forever scarring 
the family or
  healing 
   it.

For the past year, I keep getting these heart-shaped wounds on my arm. I think they are from the dogs jumping up on me or from wounds won trimming the bougainvillea, but it is amazing how many times they are in a heart shape.  I’d already written this poem before I decided to try to make a concrete poem out of it. As I progressed, it wanted to be a heart.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/scars/

Crossroads

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Best if you view this one from my blog instead of the reader, as I’m sure the Reader will mess up the spacing and shape. IMG_0258

Crossroads

You and I are at that place where roads cross—
a new place made by the need for things
going in

d
i
f
f
e
r
e
n
t
d i r e c t i o n s

to meet.

How lonely if all roads
veered off on their own,
solitary,
never coming to a junction.

It might have been thus, but for
a thousand small decisions
that led to this particular meeting,
here on this corner
of
your
road
and
my
road

Here in this location not uniquely either of us,
where we meet and mingle
and become one
for as long
as we both decide to stand
talking like neighbors,
each of us having veered halfway
away from private territory
to come to the spot
here in the middle
where we become two parts
of a center.

V
e
c
i
n
a
neighbor,
l
o
v
e
r
husband, wife
s
i
b
l
i
n
g
grandparent
f
r
i
e
n
d
daughter,son
a
c
q
u
a
i
n
t
a
n
c
e
interloper
b
y
p
a
s
s
e
r
s
or strangers when we
m
e
e
t

So
many possibilities
in
the
crossed roads
of
our
lives.

 

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/crossroads/

Locked and unlocked

30 Replies

IMG_5324

Locks

Locked up in my bedchamber. More than I can bear.
The beauty of my countenance, the shimmer of my hair
do me no good for no prince charming comes to find me here.
I will go unmarried––for my whole life, I fear.

My father thinks he honors me. I am his special treasure.
He worries not about my fate.  He thinks not of my pleasure.
I am but one more lovely thing he keeps for his collection––
admired for my golden locks, my flawless pale complexion.

I care not for beauty.  I care not for my tresses.
I do not treasure jewels or slippers or my ornate dresses.
A husband and a family are all that I desire.
A simple life’s the sort of life that I most admire.

From my window I look out upon the broad King’s Highway.
All roads must converge here––every path and byway.
And so I see them passing: beggars, countrymen and princes.
Vendors selling mangos, apples, oranges and quinces.

My eye is caught by sunlight flashing from his sword
as he stoops to have a sip from a vendor’s gourd.
He pays her with a small coin and thanks her most politely,
then mounts his horse with one sure leap–graceful, sure and spritely

I see him passing often and his face is full of laughter,
calling out and gesturing to companions, fore and after.
One day I wave my scarf at him as he goes passing by
and every day thereafter, I know I’ve won his eye.

At first he bows politely–a gesture I don’t miss.
and after a few weeks of this, one day he blows a kiss.
I reach out and grab it and press it to my face.
He rears his horse and races off at a faster pace.

The next day he doesn’t come, although I wait and wait.
But finally, I see him turning towards my father’s gate.
In distress, I call out that  he must not tarry here.
My father’s wrath must not be stirred.  It is what I most fear.

He does not see me gesturing. He hears not my distress.
I rue the day I waved at him, although I must confess
I also thrilled to think that he had come in search of me.
I fantasized that he would be the one to set me free.

But my prince never entered, though he tarried long and late.
Until the full moon rose above, he waited at the gate.
Although it had not opened by the time the next sun rose,
the young man sat astride his horse with hoarfrost on his clothes.

‘Twas then that I began my moan and tears sprang from my eyes.
I tore my clothes, scratched at my face.  I’d ruin my father’s prize!
My serving maids, sorely distressed, tried to stay my hand,
while my genteel companion sat with startled eyes and fanned!

When one maid put down the apple she’d begun to pare,
I grabbed the knife and severed one long lock of hair.
Lock after lock, I parted with this prison I had grown.
I’d see if father still wanted a daughter newly mown.

Then outside my chamber, I heard a deafening grate.
I flew back to the window. They were opening the gate!
At the same time, I heard a knock and my door opened wide.
I knew it was my father in the passageway outside.

I feared his consternation, his anger and his wrath,
and yet I chose to put myself squarely in his path.
In one hand I held half my locks, in the other were locks more.
All my other shorn-off glory, around me on the floor.

“I am not your possession,” I tell my father then.
I am no pretty pet that you can lock up in a pen.
You can have my beauty––” (Here I handed him my locks.)
“but you cannot seal me up in your private box.”

My father raised his hand, and I feared that he would strike me––
angered that he’d never again have a treasure like me––
but instead he circled his arm around my shoulder
and said, “This day, I have acquired a daughter who is bolder!

It was never me who kept you sealed  up in this tower.
You always had it within you to unlock your own power.
You must know this unlocking is both metaphor and literal.
The freedom that you’ve won today, both actual and clitoral.”

And that is how this princess, once set upon a shelf,
learned that the price of freedom is to win it for one’s self.
By cutting off my own locks, I opened up the gate.
My reward––the clever prince wise enough to wait!

Helen Meikle sent along this song which she said had a similar theme to my poem.  Can’t believe I’ve never heard it before…but I agree.  Listen to it HERE

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/locked/

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-one/

Plucked from Line––5 Poems Stolen from Ginsberg: NaPoWriMo 2016, Day 12

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For National Poetry Month, we are asked to write a poem a day for one month.  Today the prompt is to write a poem based on the index of a book. At first I was uninspired by this prompt.  I wrote several that seemed lackluster, then had chores and an appointment. In the middle of the afternoon, I decided it was time to get out of the house.  I headed to one of the fish restaurants on the lake and picked one from the road that looked peaceful and cool and atmospheric.  When I walked in, however, the TV was blaring some sports match.  When I took a table furthest from the TV, the waiter asked if I’d like to try one of the palapas.  We walked out of the large restaurant and I discovered my perfect environment to write.  I’d grabbed a book of Ginsberg poems–one of the few books I could find that actually had an index.  I settled in under the palapa roof, ignored the young men first working on their jet ski and then swashbuckling in circles in the water below the palapa, ordered a couple of quesadillas, anejo rum and Coke and  this is what transpired.

Plucked from Line––Five Poems Stolen from Ginsberg

These poems are comprised of selected lines from the first lines and titles index of Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems 1947-1980, Harper and Row, 1984

I met Allen Ginsberg in 1985 at a concert at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in L.A. when, after waiting in line for too long, I knocked on the door to ask if I could use the ladies room. He was the one who opened the door and graciously let me in. Later, he read his poems to the strum of some instrument—perhaps a sitar.

The book I took this from is signed: Allen Ginsberg, 3/12/85 HH (or perhaps AH) Los Angeles. There is a little doodle of a plant and some bees that looks like it is there to cover something else—perhaps a flub when he started to date it again. I don’t know if I bought the book that night or whether I had it and took it for him to sign. Or, perhaps I bought it in a bookstore later and it wasn’t signed for me at all. I prefer to remember that this reading/concert in the famous guitar shop was a promotion for his book, which had just been published, and that he signed this for me.

 

Plucked from Line, Five Poems

 

A bitter cold winter night
after dead souls,
after 53 years,
after thoughts fall,
after All, what else is there to say?
All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries––
a new moon looks down on our sick sweet planet.

#

An imaginary rose in a book
an open window on Chicago
as orange dusk-light falls on an old idea
at gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke.
Aunt Rose––now––might I see you?
A very dove will have her love.

#

Because we met at dusk,
Buddha died and
cars slid minute down asphalt lanes in front of
city flats, coal yards and brown rivers.
Coughing in the morning,
covered with yellow leaves,
delicate eyes that blinked blue Rockies all ash
don’t grow old.
Do we understand each other?

#

Drive all blames into one.
Go back to Egypt and the Greeks.
Green air, children sat under trees with the old.
Green valentine blues––
have you seen the movie?

#

High on laughing gas,
how come he got canned at the ribbon factory?
How sick I am.
I am a Fake Saint.

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twelve-4/

Spinal Tap: NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 10–“Book Spine Poem”

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Today’s NaPoWriMo Prompt: Write a “book spine” poem. This involves taking a look at your bookshelves, gathering a list of titles and using the titles to create a poem that is seeded throughout with your own lines, interjections, and thoughts. (Did I take the fun out of it by putting all the book titles in italics?)

Spinal Tap

The artist in his studio may anguish behind bars
while right outside his window are nights of rain and stars.
No kindness goes unpunished, my friend’s mother would say
in infinite jest­­­­––she knew that our hearts were young and gay.
She’s all blue shoes and happiness and feasts on cakes and ale.
He looks through a glass darkly as he nibbles on his kale.

When the sun also rises, he goes west with the night––
never seeing sunlight when it is at its height.
Books, paintings and poetry are the edge of man.
We have not seen the whole of him. In fact, we never can.
It is the face behind the face by which he must be gauged–
that face we never see at all if he keeps it caged.

We have the full cupboard of life, although it is not free;
and this world of the makers (whoever they might be)
is ours to pick and choose from, though we must pay the price
when we add our unique nature to others’ sage advice.
Our lives are jigsaw puzzles that each of us must solve
to form a different picture as our lives slowly evolve.

Reading adventure stories of someone else’s strife
cannot compensate us for an empty life.
Revolution from within cannot be won by reading.
To use The Joy of Cooking also takes some kneading.
Dust on my heart collecting–every year there’s more.
A little life is not enough. I must open the door.

We need new names and faces, some are heard to confess,
so who we are inside of them, no one will ever guess.
The husband’s secret shared only with the woman upstairs,
is someone else’s love story. Nobody really cares.
There is a village in the sun. I keep my real life there;
and someday, someday maybe I’ll join it if I dare.

 

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-ten-4/

Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad Tomato

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IMG_4994

Reading through a heritage seed catalogue can be a bit like reading a Reader’s Digest of adventure and human interest stories. Take, for instance, the abbreviated tale of how one tomato variety came to be saved and how it got its name. Above is an excerpt from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalogue that tells this tale. Below is the poem I wrote, prompted by this entry.

Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad Tomato

So many acts of bravery lost
to history, but at what cost?
We concentrate on acts of war
in spite of what we fight them for.
Patriotism is what we say
we’re fighting for, while day by day
young men die for corporations
and win postmortem decorations
Their sacrifice of life much praised
so profit margins may be raised.

Consider, then, the other hero
whose decorations number zero.
This hero’s grave we’re loath to mark.
The soil above his grave is stark.
His collar bore no decoration,
His passing earned him no oration.
Unnamed, unlauded, he took a train
his life and freedom to regain––
pushed up from darkness like seeds to light,
by those engaged in a selfless fight
for fairness and equality.
One more man saved. One more man free.

Those who aided him also lost––
their names like ashes lightly tossed
to fertilize the soil wherein
small shafts push up where seeds have been.
Those seeds he carried his only fare,
passed to a woman who helped him there.

The fleshy meat––tangy and pink,
its juices running down the sink
a child stands over while eating it––
teeth tearing flesh, his face well lit
by sunlight streaming in the glass
where once a hand was seen to pass
a pocketful of tomato seed––
a humble gift born out of need
to somehow give a small bit back.
Those seeds he’d carried in his pack
saved now for posterity
by one man peacefully set free.

The Prompt: Spend some time looking at the names of heirloom plants, and write a poem that takes its inspiration from, or incorporates the name of, one or more of these garden rarities. http://www.napowrimo.net/day-five-3/

I think this poem is also appropriate for the WordPress daily prompt of Contrast.

Sentimental Journey

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IMG_2672

The Smell of Curry

Would that sentiment were only
positive and never lonely––
but all emotions of the world
in sentiment are tightly curled.
Every  memory we cherish
is doubly edged with “live” and “perish.”
In every city, country, land––
bad and good go hand in hand.

The blend of cardamom and lentil
always makes me sentimental.
Odors of turmeric and its ilk,
garam masala and coco milk.
Curry spices being roasted,
degree of peppers being boasted,
chickpeas, carrots, potatoes, rice––
stirring in each thing that’s nice.

What do I think of when I smell
and taste that it is going well?
Bombay and wedding saris thin
sliding down my youthful skin.
Visions of a midnight ride
to cages with young girls inside
sold by their parents and then resold
nightly for a bit of gold.

Traffic, sitar music, fingers
scooping curry––all this lingers.
The beauty of that winsome song
that showed me where the world’s gone wrong.
His action, swift, unthinking, curt
of small coins cast into the dirt
to deflect those who beg and bleat,
surrounding us in every street.

Palaces and then the clash
of children in a world of trash,
the refuse of this giant city
the world they lived in—what a pity.
Back when traveling was new,
experiences were so few
that India changed my life forever.
So, will I forget it?  Never.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/cherish/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/sentimental/

The Secret Life of Gardeners

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DSC07876
The Secret Life of Gardeners

My gardener of fourteen years
has a stern unsmiling wife and grown children
that I used to know well.
I set his morning coffee on the terrace table

and there is some secret
twining through the dense thunbergia vine
that causes the flowers
to nod their heads.

Later, the man who does not know I watch
drinks his morning coffee grown tepid in the cup,
coughs gently (or is it a laugh?) behind the hand
that cradles the telephone,

sly smile betraying a secret love
as clearly as the small child
who sometimes accompanies him to work.
Some senora’s, he tells me,

but the child
has his eyes and solid legs,
his shy manner,
lives with his mother and her husband,

but sits on my steps with a sugar cookie––
betraying no more secrets
on purpose
than his father does.


(This is an extensive rewrite of a poem written three years ago. Since this is the fourth time I’ve written to this prompt in three years, it seems fair to do a rewrite on this round!)

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/secret/

Leapin’ Lizards

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DSCN0867

Leapin’Lizards

Iguanas, lizards, gekkos, turtles, toads and frogs and snakes
are not the things that we should fear in life, for goodness sakes.
These creatures in their own domains present no awful threat.
Just leave them where they are, for none were made to be a pet.

Our tame lives seek to steal the wildness from such natural things,
but wildness is not what curtailing wildness ever  brings.
We must learn to leap ourselves––by entering our lives
and breaking free from prisons–our cages, pens or hives––

to buzz the world around us and see what we can find
to release us from our lethargy and the ties that bind.
If you do not know the way, just go and find a child
and follow him or her to places where they keep the wild.

The beach or any sandpile may serve to be your clues
of how to color your own life with more vivid hues.
A thing as simple as wet sand can take a child to
places where you had forgot you could be taken to.

Castle moats or rivers, dams, mountain tops or caves
huge mansions that are sacrifices to that evening’s waves.
Our wild imaginations are where we all should go
to find a little wildness when our lives are slow.

Go find a dog to walk with if you need a pet
then take him out to some wild beach–and both of you, get wet!
Wildness is for doing, not for sitting on a shelf.
So free the creatures pining there and find some for yourself!

(Click on first photo to enlarge and view gallery)


Those baby sea turtles are being set free, not being collected. Happy Leap Year!!!
(If you want to know more about the release of the baby turtles, go HERE.)

This poem was written partially in response to this strange strange news from my home town that was sent to me by two friends yesterday. Read about it here:  http://www.chapala.com/webboard/index.php?/topic/60430-tiger-in-la-floresta/

It was also in response to the prompt “Leap,” in honor of this being the extra day in this leap year!  https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/leap/