Category Archives: Poem

DVerse Poets: Spill

30 Replies

IMG_8653

This one word prompt was “Spill” and called for just 44 words to be used. If you are a word-counter, oh ye of little faith, you will find there are just 43 words in the body of the poem because, after reducing the first draft from 96 words, I didn’t realize until after I’d posted that the 44 wasn’t supposed to include the title.  Although I could easily and happily have reinstalled the last word painfully cut, I cannot because the poem is actually a photograph that took me forever to print out (because the printer isn’t cooperating) and photograph (because I needed to find a spot without a late afternoon glare) and adjust the poem to make all the words the same darkness because I never did find a spot without a glare.) So please just consider the title the first word of the poem.  It really is, anyway! (WordPress does not believe in letting us “shape” poems, thus the need to print up and photograph it.)

 

Want to play along?  If so, go here to find the prompt and other poems written to it:
https://dversepoets.com/2016/06/13/quadrille-11/

Eminent Domains

12 Replies

daily life color163 (1)

Eminent* Domains

As a new wife I chose mountains, made a home of them and that’s
where we were surrounded by potted plants and cats.
Perched amid the redwoods, my art studio in their shade,
I looked out across the mountains as I made and made and made.

I was happy in the mountains, but the incline and the trees
made living somewhat harder as I began to wheeze.
The pollen took my breath away and walking was a labor––
the trees impeding access to and vision of each neighbor.

daily life color165

So I moved to the desert, with openness my quarry.
I loved its subtle beauties and the sparseness of its glory.
All the arms of cacti reaching to the sky,
the faded pastel sunsets as starry nights drew nigh.

But, although good for walking at a faster pace,
the desert, lacking moisture, dried my hands and face.
It dusted all my furniture and opened cracks in wood,
carved other furrows in my face, where they remain for good.

IMG_1910

The ocean spreads before me, a different watery land––
all her morning treasures displayed across the sand.
I examine coral and the fragile bones of fish,
surveying and collecting everything I wish

But the ocean is bipolar—sometimes she’s a bitch.
Perspiration trickles, causing me to itch.
I love the beach in wintertime and love it in the fall,
but beachside in the summer is no fun at all.

daily life color164

I have lived in mountains, the desert and the sea
and all these special places still have a place in me.
But if you ever ask me which place I’d like to be,
I fear I’d have to answer that I think I need all three.

The mountains in the summer loom up and beckon me.
The desert in the winter, balanced by the sea.
It seems there is no place on earth where I will just remain.
I claim mountains, sea and desert as my regions of domain.

*Note:  Although “eminent domain” is a familiar phrase, I am speaking of eminent in its other connotation, namely:
  1. used to emphasize the presence of a positive quality.

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

About Not Giving Rage’s Yell

8 Replies

IMG_6775


……………………………………………………….About Not Giving Rage’s Yell

About what
Niggling minor matter are you
Going to
Rage until
You convince yourself that you want to be

Anyone else but yourself?
Notice, please, that your
Gait is even. You have two strong legs.
Resting  in your arms, a child.
You are so blessed.

A look around you might reveal
Neighbors with broken legs or wings or
Gaping minds.
Remember, please, all
You have been given.

A miracle that you were even born.
Nothing in the world
Gives a larger gift than
Receiving life itself.
You are most fortunate.

Yelling never
Opens any doors to
Understanding.

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

Note: Here is a perfect example of an alternative to anger in responding to a situation with which you might not agree : 
situation: http://community.today.com/parentingteam/post/if-you-see-something-say-something-my-note-to-three-teen-girls-at-starbucks

Truth

5 Replies
 I invite you to send a photo to illustrate this poem, according to your understanding of it.


Truth

I fly on wings through morning dew
to try to get away from you.
I cry in vain, I kick and scream
to slip away—but still I seem
in spite of anything I do,
still to be caught up in you.

So I give up to float the stream
flowing from this morning’s dream.
Let all that it may generate
flow through me to create my fate
at first for minutes of my day
then hours and days that float away

to lose themselves in clouds of dreams
that leak out from the day’s stitched seams
conceived to keep reality
of other worlds inside of me.
I pull at threads and slip between
into the universe’s scene.

There thoughts float free in eddies of
creation that consist of love
and hate and light and dark and all
that generated our earthly ball.
We seek to have just part of it.
Impossible from the start of it.

We do not know the why of it,
but we are born and die of it––
that paradox of evil and good
made tragic by our parenthood.
That truth born out by earthly schemes
we seek to comprehend in dreams.

We are not meant to understand
by what generative hand
life flowed into the universe.
But still we’re fated to rehearse
the truth of light shadowing dark,
in novel, painting, play and quark.

Dramas in the world around us––
the sounds and sights that still astound us––
contain these opposites within––
light versus dark, yang joined with yin.
These ironies of life and art
are, in the end, what create heart.

The prompt today was “Generation” which of course means not only a generation, but also the act of generation.  That prompt led me to this poem which is really about some hard truths of life that we all face but few of us, if any, really understand.  Nonetheless, the truth of the world is  something that we all hold within us.


 

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

Carpe Diem Tan-Renga Challenge, May 9

4 Replies

new Tan Renga…morning glory!

The idea is to take a three-line stanza, written by one poet…and write a two-line stanza to complete the Tan Renga. The first three lines were written by Chiyo-Ni (1703-1775)

 

morning glory!
the well-bucket entangled,
I ask for water.

and my answer is given
in rain.

Sacrifice

2 Replies

IMG_6707

Some people give their lives to it,
And others never do––
Conditions never calling for
Rash actions to ensue.
I’ve held onto my life because
Fate never asked me to
Immolate myself to save
Child, soldier, Jew,
Ensuring that I remain here
Securely in life’s queue.

I don’t think sacrifice has been anything I’ve had to do much of in my life, short of occasionally knowingly giving someone the last pork chop or the biggest piece of cake.  Perhaps this is because I had no children.

I can think of only one big potential sacrifice I made in my life and that is something I will not speak of–mainly because people it might affect are still alive. So, in lieu of writing a personal essay or poem on this topic, I invite you to read an article about the top ten most inspiring self sacrifices.  You can go  HERE to read it.

 

If you’d like to read what other bloggers have to say about the subject of sacrifice, go here:: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/sacrifice/

Hope

3 Replies

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

13 Replies

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

9 Replies

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/