The Lady Doth Protest Too Much
That name engraved across my mind
is of the phantasmic kind.
The one who seems to have carved it there
is one for whom I do not care.
It is not grounded in truth or fact.
It seems my thoughts have just been hacked.
for dVerse Poets
To see other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
The King of Chaos. I was on my way to a local hotel/restaurant to read my Trump poem when I saw a woman selling this pinata beside the road. I braked, turned around and went to buy it. A man, seeing me buying it, stopped to buy one as well. “Does it have anything inside?” He asked. “No, you have to cut it open in back and fill it,” I answered. “What should we fill it with?” asked his female companion. “I’d suggest filling it with baloney,” I answered.
The King of Chaos. I was on my way to a local hotel/restaurant to read my Trump poem when I saw a woman selling this pinata beside the road. I braked, turned around and went to buy it. A man, seeing me buying it, stopped to buy one as well. “Does it have anything inside?” He asked. “No, you have to cut it open in back and fill it,” I answered. “What should we fill it with?” asked his female companion. “I’d suggest filling it with baloney.”
Depression
A chain of glimmering wishes gleams silver as I free
my mind from all its worries of what is or what may be,
but moment by sadder moment, my sorrow flames again,
whipped up from fading embers of a sadness that has been
lingering like a trance that I cannot escape.
Faint shadows of those horrors that assume a larger shape.
I dip into my past to restore wild memories
that I naively hope will bring depression to its knees.
But they do too little to trim away the fears
That hover all around me, holding pleasure in arrears.
The word prompts for today’s Sunday Whirl are: sorrow dip chain wild silver free trance glimmer faint trim
(If you can think of a better title for this poem, please suggest it. Company arrived just as I was finishing it and gotta get posted.
ddvers
Overdone Quinceañera
She’s framed in a portrait that’s slightly off-center
wearing a fur stole her sister has lent her.
Her chin on her hand, jewels on finger and wrist,
she’s trying to hide that she’s never been kissed.
Just a teenager, she’s longing for glory,
trying to add romance to her story.
Though she looks mature, she is new to the scene.
Time enough for such glamour when she is sixteen!
An Ekphrastic poem for dVerse Poets Open Link
Trying to keep it simple is harder than you think.
Each time I straighten out my life, fate adds another kink.
Out There
Back when you were innocent—back when you played the clown,
before your mind was jaded by seeking wide renown,
back before the pomp, the glory and the plaudits,
back before the news reports, the surveys and the audits,
back there when a diary preceded post and tweet,
there were words of innocence, secretive and sweet.
Back when every aspect of life was not for show,
back when information tended to move slow,
was there more than one hushed aspect of your life,
secrets not used against you, as lethal as a knife?
Everything’s now out there in selfies and YouTubes—
your angsts and loves and conquests, not to mention boobs.
What is left to grow inside, to flourish and to bloom?
What secrets left confined to the safety of your room?
Everything’s out spinning in the cruel world.
No way to get it back again, no secret ever curled
safely under the covers of a private book
where even your best friend has never had a look.
Do they still make diaries that aren’t electronic
where words languish on pages, quiet and laconic?
Where little girls confide their thoughts to a much-smudged page,
all their secret passions, their hurts and hopes and rage?
“Dear Diary” the sweetest confidant of all?
One that will never tell on you. One always there on call.
What will happen in a world where everything’s on view
forever to be classified, forever part of you?
Never will we ever leave our pasts behind.
Everything is indexed, simple enough to find.
Your sons and your daughters will peek into your past.
Google yourself now. Won’t they just have a blast?
I just stumbled upon my old diary from age eleven through thirteen yesterday. What a revelation. Facts garnered: I had someone sleep over at least three times a week, lots of relatives passed through one summer, my best friend went home mad a lot, I called lunch dinner and did the dishes every day, woke up late whenever I could and never revealed the names of secret crushes, even in my diary. I had a “dreamy” boy-girl party the year I turned 13 (a feat never repeated, at least among my friends) and danced with every boy except J (yuck.) Mr. G didn’t like me anymore (perhaps) and we seemed to take a lot of trips down to the Frosty Freeze at night––probably because other kids did the same and we had no other place to gather. Nothing, however, to preclude my running for public office and all easily burned if there were. And that simple event and the thoughts thereafter led to this poem.
The RDP Wednesday Prompt is Simple.
Roll of the Dice
If you need to find those parts of you
particled off by life,
those strings of you that have spun off
in times of loss and strife,
address the world with that new you
and let it hear your voice.
A dirge becomes a rousing reel
depending on the voice
that chooses how to read the dice,
reflecting gain or loss
by their interpretation
of the numbers that they toss.
For the Sunday Whirl 698 Wordle Prompt the words are:
time hear lose world off string life particles reel need find
Performance Anxiety: Nightmare
Bassoons are idly chuckling in the orchestra,
and in the aisle, popcorn crackles underfoot
as the last audience member hurries to find her seat.
I stand center stage
wondering what play this is
and how I came to be standing here.
The curtain opens.
I am naked.
And I have not even seen my lines!
For SOCs the prompt is “Crackle.”
Moody Blues
Like a child denied its favorite toy, you slip into that gloom
that seems to cast a sorcerer’s spell all across the room.
You jinx that joy formerly sown––that rapture gone astray.
Like a gift once kindly given, then cruelly jerked away,
A soft wind blows a kind of truce that stills your restless mind,
and styles a more tranquil place for you to hide behind.
For the Sunday Whirl the words are: favor kind jinx spell sorcery gift denial child style rapture truce
My Name
It would have never occurred
to my mother or father
to look up the meaning of the name
before giving it to me.
In the Apocrypha,
Judith slew the Asian general
to save her people.
In Ethiopia, Judith is “Yodit,”
cruel usurper of the throne
and destroyer of Axum.
These women my parents had no knowledge of
might well have scorned the “Judy” I evolved into,
despite my mother’s best intentions
of always calling me Judith Kay.
Uncle Herman called me Jude
and I loved that,
but for years,
until I married,
nobody else ever did.
I never had many nicknames,
except from my father who called me Pole Cat
and my sister who called me Jooj Pooj.
My oldest sister, Betty Jo,
knows her name
might have been prompted
by the popularity of Betty Boop
and my sister Patti Adair
has the same middle name
as her cousin Jayne
because my mother named them both,
but there is no story
for my given names.,
except that my mother liked them both.
I can draw a wading bird
using just the letters of my first name
in the correct progression,
lifting the pen off the paper only twice,
to form the eye and leg.
Yet for years,
my name was a bird
that hadn’t found its wings.
My surname was carried to America
in the hull of a ship—
when my grandmother,
born of Dutch-immigrant parents,
married to an immigrant
Dutch baker to have a son
who passed the name Dykstra on to me.
Judy Kay Dykstra
The last two letters of my first name
and my middle initial
are the first three letters of my last name,
and the remaining four letters, rearranged, spell “star.”
Nobody planned that.
Judykstra
Judykstar.
The “dyke” part of my name is self-explanatory,
and the suffix “stra” is derived from
the old Germanic word “sater,”
meaning “dweller,”
and although I’ve never lived by a seawall,
I like my name in its Dutch Shoes.
My surname
is not frequently seen
in the phonebooks
of most towns.
I’m not the one
who put it in famous places
like “Dykstra Hall” at UCLA or
in baseball statistics
on the sports page,
and it was John Dykstra
who had it engraved
on the academy award.
But it was my name written
along with my phone number
over the urinal at the library
in turquoise magic marker
by a disgruntled student,
and it took one month of late-night phone calls
from men asking, “Do you . . .?”
before a caller admitted
where he found the number
and was persuaded
to wash it off the wall.
And it was my name
written on the label of
a favorite coat left at the pier
and never returned,
so ever afterwards,
perhaps, my name
pressed against someone else’s neck.
I keep trying to change my name
into something else.
Into a bird.
Into a married name.
Drop mine, take his.
Keep mine and his,
I take his, he takes mine,
so we exchange names, both keeping both.
In the end, though, he drops mine, I keep both.
Judith Kay Dykstra-Brown. Bob Brown
My name next to his on a gravestone
in my hometown in South Dakota,
only mine open-dated.
My name on a paycheck every month for years,
and in the records of the tax collector,
then on a social security check.
For so long,
I was not yet within my name.
I wanted it to hold me,
but I couldn’t squeeze into it.
Until, finally,
my name on books and art
that told its full story.
Judy Dykstra-Brown.
I made it mine.
The Offering
My cat surprised me with a gift
but I must say, I’m rather miffed
with the hairball that she left––
(those locks of which she’s now bereft.)
Was this donation made by chance,
or was it planned far in advance?
Did she commence her furry tearing
with the intent that she’d be sharing?
I wonder if she formed that ball
with any future plans at all
to heave it out upon the chest
of one I thought that she loved best?
Oh that she could communicate
whether it was love or hate
that prompted this hair artistry
produced and then coughed up on me!
The SOCS prompt is to close eyes, open book, point to word, open eyes and use the word as a prompt, so here goes. The prompt word that suppllied itself was “Surprised.”
What is the logic of not believing in abortion but believing it is okay to let babies die of Ebola in Africa because we have cut off aid to fund vaccinations…or to allow children to die of measles because our misguided head of national health does not believe in vaccinations? Nothing in the Bible says charity should be ended at national borders or that the rich should profit by the neglect of the poor. Think, people, think! And please read this poem written by my friend Andrea Huelsenbeck at: https://arhtisticlicense.com/about-artistic-license/:
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 