Will you forgive me if I just give a link to a poem I wrote about a clown ten years ago? HERE is the link.
For MVB-Clown
The Clown, For MVB, Feb 17, 2024
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Category Archives: Poem
Shards..For Sunday Whirl Wordle 641, Feb 11, 2024
Shards
Untethered shards of nightmares burst out of dark to day
to scar reality with what we hoped we’d put away.
Words of fear and loathing—guilts once left in the past
rise out of dreams to plague us. Lost shadows once more cast
against the broken light of mornings, onslaughts we must fight
to claim the new day’s pleasures that are within our right
to enjoy without being afraid of chaos in our pasts,
for after all, the future is all that really lasts.
For Sunday Whirl Wordle 641 the prompt words are: untethered shards nightmare burst scar words rights light broken afraid lost rise Image from Unsplash.
A Stitch in Time For Wordle 640
Sidewalks for MVB, Jan 30, 2024
Sidewalks
Be it narrow, be it wide,
A sidewalk’s made for side-to-side.
Slab by slab and stone by stone,
I do not want to walk alone.
MVB’s prompt today is Sidewalk
In A Pinch
In a Pinch
A pinch of this, a pinch of that.
A pinch of salt or pinch of fat.
What is held between one’s fingers,
the thought of it most surely lingers—
those grains of salt to lick off you
or thoughts of belly fat to rue.
The dVerse Quadrille prompt today is pinch.
To see how others have responded to the prompt, go HERE.
Image by Ksenia Makagono on Unsplash.
Gossip: For Wordle 638, Jan 21, 2024
Gossip
Words curl and flicker like a whip,
unfurled from tongue and launched by lip.
Born in malice, spread through spite,
they disturb sleep and split the night.
Scarring spirit, wounding soul,
as though that is a cruel game’s goal.
Karma
In dreams they faintly circle ’round,
tip-toeing on familiar ground.
Some call them nightmares, to let them be.
Others say that they are key,
these rumors once more freshly cast,
as warnings of misdeeds long past
that if remembered, we won’t redo,
and thus ill-feelings we won’t renew.
Words for the Sunday Whirl today are: curl faint flicker circle tip words split spirit born scar key game. Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.
Small Town South Dakota
Believe it or not, this was our main street, two blocks long!
Still Life With A Small Town Girl
For many years when I was small and far into my teens,
my summer days were filled with little else than magazines
and books and all the other things a girl in a small town
brings into her summers just to make the days less brown.
Day after day of reading soon led to dreaming, and
my shade beneath the cherry tree became a foreign land.
I did not know the name of it, but in this foreign place
the people did such lovely things. They kept a faster pace.
There were many things to see and people who liked doing—
circuses and carnivals, badminton and horse-shoeing,
imaginings and plays and travels. People who liked dancing.
Instead of trudging down the street, these people would be prancing.
I dreamed such dreams of bigger towns, and far-away towns, too.
All summer, I lay in the grass, dreaming what I’d do
when I was so much older and could go out on my own.
I’d wander off into the world. Explore the great unknown.
Now six decades later, I have done it all—
so many of those things I yearned to do when I was small.
I’ve been to places far and wide—Africa and Peru.
In England, France, Australia—I found so much to do.
Plays and concerts, dances, films, museums, garden walks.
Lectures, movies, workshops, classes, roundtables and talks.
Tours and treks and trips and sorties—guided meditations.
Somehow life seemed fuller packed with exotic vacations.
But now that I am seventy-six, I’d appreciate
if all this activity would finally abate.
I dream of slower days that I’d spend dreaming in the shade
where all my memories of days spent doing would just fade
into the past and leave me to dream here in this place,
swinging in my hammock, at a slower pace.
Leaving my activity to stream from head to pen,
filling up the page with all the places I have been.
Thus making sense of why I had to go and go,
speeding up the days that back then seemed to me so slow.
I guess I had to travel to find others of my kind
to teach me that life’s riches are mainly in the mind!
For dVerse Poets, we are to write a poem about a city. If you’d like to see more photos of my small town and environs, go HERE. And you can see how others responded to the prompt HERE.
Blunt Cut (For RDP)
Blunt Cut
(A Dear John Note from Rapunzel)
If my hair is a ladder, I’m cutting each rung
and closing the window from which they are hung.
Hope you find a good job since my decision to lop
off your means of support when I cut off my mop!
For RDP: Blunt
The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting, For dVerse poets
The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting
First thing in the morning, when I’m fresh from dreams,
your memory cuts so sharply through the day’s beginning that I wake.
Once, in that long dream of childhood, days were not over half so soon.
Early in September, below the slippery slide,
the steady beat of dribbling basketballs.
So many acts of bravery lost—
“Annie I Over” and “New Orleans.”
Way back in our salad years,
it was so very easy to trap wonder in a box.
The dominoes going head to toe.
All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire.
More in the air than possibility.
You would think there would be some remnant left.
Enough, I say!
It was the beginning of the end.
I’m counting steps from one to ten across my heart, then back again.
What you blindly get into in youth can be the end of you.
I must ask, is it me alone—
this bald horizon line, the teeth of far-off cliffs?
The tide comes in each morning.
That isn’t my heart beating with wild abandon.
I scream, I cry, I moan, I curse.
The rain is falling drop on drop.
All day long, the rain comes down,
writing this poem with water on cobblestones.
The moon like an animal hovers over and around our houses.
My life catches in its static house.
I am an ally of the truths that lie the whole world over,
though some of them are ill-begotten.
Since it is true, I must report.
Every day since birth, I have been emptying the cup.
My past drifts away from me.
I seem to fit my life now. I’m cozy in my skin.
Is it gain or loss to feel contentment?
A woman should be shrouded, silent, pregnant, dumb.
You crane your necks and stand and gawk.
Clap hands, you say, Clap hands to the music.
The act of creation is the greatest art.
For dVerse Poets, we were to make a poem from the first lines of one poem we published each month in 2023. Finding it almost impossible to sort through over a thousand posts made in the past year, I instead went through my file where some poems from past years are filed alphabetically. Selecting some poems from poem files A to D, I recorded first lines that seemed to be possible lines in a poetic compilation, then set about reordering them. This is the poem I came up with. The lines are exactly as they were in the 40 poems I borrowed the first lines from. The only changes made concerned punctuation and capital letters. The title is also from a first line.
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
The Split, For Wordle 637
The Split
She drew her mantra to her and wound it like a veil
to form a place within he tried to pierce to no avail.
With no key to enter and no grounds to demand
entry to that space where the outer world was banned,
he switched his thoughts to other things: a blue bird’s sudden flight
and the ribbons it created as it split a shaft of light.
A chain of beads of shattered light like glass spread on the floor
were scars that vanished one by one as he walked out the door.
The Sunday Whirl Wordle 637 prompts for today are: scar chain bird ribbon beads shaft switches mantra key grounds drew veil Photo by kiwihug on Unsplash
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 