Category Archives: Poem

“Sunday School” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 655, May 19, 2024

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Sunday School 

Memories dancing through my mind
sing lyrics of the hopeful kind—
church on Sunday, exultation
of a once-united nation.
Loud amens expressing hope,
unheedful of that misanthrope
squirreling away those nuts
of “ifs” and “whens” and “ands” and “buts.”
Forgetting brotherhood’s kind needs.
Choking peace lilies with weeds.
“Make American Great Again!”
expressed with a malevolent grin.
White-robed zealots burning crosses,
Proud Boys complaining of losses
promulgate a hateful nation
fearful of miscegenation.
Ladies sipping afternoon tea,
if you still have hopes for liberty,
rise up against that chanting mass,
hateful, vile-filled and crass.
They are the very anti-thesis
to those lessons taught by Jesus
back when we were innocent,
believing truth was heaven-sent.

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle are: forget church dancers tea robes weed sing exultation hope squirrel nuts amen. Image by Ben White on Unsplash

A Whiff, For SOCS, May 18, 2024

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A Whiff

What’s that smell
that spray can’t quell?
Smells a bit
like puppy shit,
but never fear,
no puppies here.
It comes alone
from Mom’s cologne.
Efforts relentless
to turn her scentless?
Those ends we sought
have turned to naught.
Each day or two?
A new pee-yew!!!!

 

Without a doubt, the absolute worst perfume ever invented on Earth was Ben Hur. Guaranteed to empty a room the minute its wearer entered!

 

For SOCS: What’s that smell? For this challenge we had to write stream of consciousness with no editing….Phew.

 

One No Trump for dVerse Poets, May 17, 2024

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 One No Trump

I must begin this sad narration

with these words of sad regret

for the state of our lost nation

 that has lost that noble way

carefully  planned in its gestation,

perfect in its founders’ minds,

but somehow skewed in maturation

by takeovers from the Trumpster set

 led by an idiot’s vain oration!

The dVerse Poets Magic 9 prompt today was to write *a poem in 9 lines
*meter and line-length at discretion of poet
*rhyme, a b a c a d a b a, with c and d unrhymed

Go HERE to read other poems that followed the propt.

 

 

Double Betrayal for dVerse Poets May 15, 2024, left-in-the-lurch

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Double Betrayal

Her thoughts in parting were most candid,
her emotions, clearly branded
on her face. They reprimanded
him for how he cruelly stranded
her within their love affair—
how he left her standing there
alone, heartbroken, vulnerable.
How he’d burst her true love’s bubble.
Thus was her earlier promise broken
before a single word was spoken
when she met them, face to face,
engaged in intimate embrace—
that one who was to be her mister
with her faithless younger sister.

For dVerse Poets

See how others responded HERE.

“Cosmos” For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 654

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Cosmos

My soul is restless, dark and lost.
Its flickering flame is tempest-tossed.
Ceaseless waves assault my ears,
their chanting pulse swelling my fears.

Slipping  into their restless grasp,
I void my terror in a gasp.
No fan of chance, I cast my lot
into that teeming marble pot

where those lost futures roil and toss,
whose progress is the potion’s loss.
Where is that world secure and calm
that cups one in a soothing balm?

Those caught in it feel its caress
unaware of that duress
that catches others in its swell––
one world encompassing Heaven and Hell.

 

For the latest Sunday Whirl, the prompt words are: waves slip void soul restless dark chanting flickering pulse chance marble fan.

Fire on the Mountain, (for My Vivid Blog prompt, “All”)

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Fire on the Mountain

The smell of burning leaves us only when we sleep,
the hills above us aflame for weeks as the wind
catches the upraised hands of a dozen fires
and hurries them here and there.

It is like this every year
at the end of summer,
with the dry grass ignited by
light reflected by a piece of glass
or careless farmers burning off their fields.

The lushness of the rainy season
long since turned to fodder by the sun,
the fires burn for weeks along the ridges
and the hollows of the Sierra Madre—
raising her skirts from where we humans
puddle at her ankles.

Imprisoned in their separate worlds,
the village dogs bark
as though if freed
they’d catch the flames
or give chase at least.

The distracting smell of roasting meat
hints at some neighborhood barbecue,
but only afterwards do we find
the cow caught by her horns in the fence
and roasted live.

Still, that smell of roasting meat
pushes fingers through the smoke of coyote brush
and piñon pines and sage,

The new young gardener’s
ancient heap of rusting Honda
chugs up the hill like the rhythm section
of this neighborhood banda group
with its smoke machine gone crazy
and its light show far above.

The eerie woodwinds
of canine voices far below
circle like children
waiting for their birthday cake,
ringing ‘round the rosy,
ringing ‘round the rosy
as ashes, ashes,
it all falls down.

For My Vivid Blog, the prompt is “All.”

If I Followed the Wandering Poet for dVerse Poets, May 9, 2024

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If I Follow the Wandering Poet

Who cares
if I swim naked in my pool?
All other human occupants
have left this neighborhood behind,
leaving more room
for possums, skunks,
birds, scorpions, spiders
and me.

I keep a closer company with them
than I do with any human these days.
This week, I talk to the large caterpillar
who seems to sprout two crystals from his crown
as he sits for a day on the Olmec head
that guards my swimming pool.

Back and forth, back and forth I pass,
adding a look at him to my lap routine.
For one long afternoon,
he sits still—like Alice’s caterpillar,
but hookah-less,
meditating in this grey place.

If he were on my Virginia Creeper,
I’d be repositioning him
to the empty lot next door, but here
he seems to be a guest; and so some etiquette
keeps me from altering his placement
as he sits on stone, moving his suction cups in sequence
now and then only to alter his direction, not his territory.

Perhaps I’ve stayed too long
in this one place.
That wandering poet within me
may have somewhere it thinks I need to go.
If it creates a good alternative,
I might follow in much the same way
that I have come to this point
in my poem.
Blindly, in a maze of words,
open to what comes next.

For dVerse Poets:  Write a poem about a walkabout or pilgrimage or wandering.

“Looking” for dVerse Poets, May 3, 2024

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     Click on photos to enlarge. 

                                                                       LOOKING

Every Sunday, sitting
on a small wooden chair
memorizing verses from a Bible with my name
stamped in golden letters on the cover,
singing “Jesus loves me, this I know,”
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Then in college, 
books and beer and Buddha,
that expanded religion of poetry
and midnight discussions in
the game room. Rumi, Roethke,
Donne and Philosophy 101.
Time after time,
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Moving once more into a wider
world with no hard chairs. Just
a backpack and the classroom of an open road,
putting things learned into practice,
that religion of experience, heady,
I found again, box after box, but didn’t fit inside.

For dVerse Poets this week, we were asked to compose ‘Bop’ poems.

The ‘Bop’ poetic form has 23 total lines in three stanzas ordered thus, with the same one line refrain following each of the three stanzas:

  1. a six-line stanza – that poses a problem;
  2. an eight-line stanza – that expands upon that problem;
  3. a six-line stanza – that solves, or fails to solve, the problem

For this prompt, we are to include the following line as the refrain after each of the three stanzas: I found a box and put a room inside
OR:
I found a box… [add your own words to complete the line]

Prompt guidelines:
No mandatory rhyme or meter;
Experiment with enjambment;
Use minimalistic grammar

Sleuthing, for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 30

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case 1.indd

Sleuthing

There’s a Clue in the Leaning Chimney and a Password to Larkspur Lane,
and no one will ever discover them without me, that is plain.
I’d love to go a-sleuthing, my sidekicks at my side—
George Fayne, who is so boyish and Bess Marvin who’s so wide.

Together we’d read diaries and find each hidden clue,
‘cause no one else but us has ever known quite what to do
with broken lockets, attics, tolling bells or hollow oaks;
for non-teenage detectives seem to come off like bad jokes.

They may have had the clues but never seemed to solve the crime—
these matters just too difficult for searchers in their prime.
I’d hop in my blue roadster with a picnic box from Hannah
and somehow I would wind up in Wyoming or Montana.

Interviewing cowboys is the way I’d have my fun,
returning to Ned Nickerson when all of this was done.
I don’t have other fantasies of being Peter Pan
or Goldilocks, Rapunzel, Cathy or Superman.

Those fairy tales and comic books and novels are unreal.
I’d have to be like Nancy—a character who’s real!
The only mystery I can’t solve of all her mysteries seen
is how I’ve gotten so damn old while she remains sixteen!

The last NaPoWriMo prompt of the year is to write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.

“Hot as Blazes” for dVerse Poets, Apr 29, 2024

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Hot as Blazes

I must say that I love gazing
at a fire brightly blazing.
Popping corn or making s’mores,
a well-laid fire never bores!
And when the embers fade to dust
from a fire over-fussed,
then we’ll shuffle off to bed,
toasty warm and aptly fed!

 

 

For dVerse Poets the prompt word is “Blaze”