Category Archives: Poem

An Elegy to the Ravelled Sleeve for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 29

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The prompt for NaPoWriMo was to write a poem making use of one of ten words from Taylor Swift lyrics. Once again given to excess, I’ve written a poem making use of them all.  Here are the words: Cardigan, elegy, Mercurial, antithetical, albatross, self-effacing, altruism, incandescent, Machiavellian, clandestine.


An Elegy to The Ravelled Sleeve

Here’s an elegy from this bard again,
to my worn-out cardigan.
It’s challenged in its warp and weave,
unravelling about the sleeve,
and yet I wear it, nearly neckless,
causing folks to call me feckless.
I persist in my rebellion,
feeling slightly Machiavellian.
The opposite of narcissism
is my act of altruism
as I decide that it is better
to donate money for a sweater
to my local homeless shelter
so someone lacking clothes that swelter
can thereby don and thus bedeck
an albatross around their neck!
Self-effacing to the end,
perhaps I’ll start another trend
by donning daily my sweater’s dregs
instead of slit-pants on my legs.
Antithetical to current fashion,
clandestine in my garment passion,
Mercurial and incandescent,
my  mood purely effervescent,
I’ll stride down the street with glee,
my favorite sweater surrounding me!

(My apologies to Mr. Shakespeare!  )

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle #652

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Memory 

The habits of mind come trickling through,
to add their salt to your simmering brew
of appointments and stories and poems and tasks
and all of the other things modern life asks
that you fill up your time with—full to the brim 
from its secretive roots to its furthest stretched limb.

It’s shadows and sunlight, it’s flowers and stones—
from the flesh of your life to its skin and its bones.
Those niggling doubts that fill corners of mind,
crowding out thoughts of a cheerier kind
as all your vast memory falls to the axe
of that onerous visitor’s tuggings and hacks.
Stripping your mind to set it to rest,
drawing its sunrise to fade in the west.

For The Sunday Whirl #652 the prompt words are: vast salty simmering habits mind trickle secretive brim axe roots shadows stones

Crossroads, for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 27

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Please click on this post to center the poem.

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.

Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina, For SOCS Apr 27, 2024

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Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina

DSC09815

Showing Up Late for Happy Hour at the Corner Cantina

I’m late because of accidents and countless little slips
like toothpaste down my shirt front, hair caught in my zips
and a seat belt that was caught and wouldn’t span my hips.

So bring out all your arsenal—your bludgeons and your whips.
I deserve your censure, your curses and your yips.
Perhaps it is my fault that you’re in tequila’s grips!

By looking at the tablecloth and counting all the drips,
It seems that all the salsa’s not contacting your lips,
and all your margaritas aren’t winding up as sips.

I’m making the assumption you might need more chips,
and more salsa fresca and guacamole dips,
which means our busy waiter must make some extra trips.

He doesn’t seem amused by all your clever quips
which increase with the frequency of your little nips,
so I’m hoping the aforementioned will earn him larger tips!

For SOCS: The prompt word is “Show”

4 A.M. for NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 26

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full moon morning, jdbphoto 2017

4 A.M.

It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.

for NaPoWriMo we are commanded to write a poem making use of alliteration, assonance and consonance.

Judy’s Advice on Preparations for the Afterlife

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Judy’s Advice on Preparations for the Afterlife
(For Jim)

Do you get a discount
or will there be none
when your time on Earth
will finally be done?

Whether it is better
to be raw or roasted well
depends on where you’re going.
Is it Heaven or to Hell?

 

I received this request for a poem from Jim Anshutz:

Some of my thoughts on cremation. 1. I will ask if they give senior discounts.. 2. I will also inform them that I sit out in the sun each day and get quite sunburnt. My question is, “do I get a discount for being pre-cooked? You can take it from here, Jude. Please make this a very humorous piece of poetry. Hit it, Jude🔥🔥🔥

 

 

After 15 Years, for dVerse Poets Apr 25, 2024

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If this poem left justifies, click on it to get it to center as it is a shape poem!

After 15 Years

Your memory                                                     cuts so sharply
through my dream’s beginning that I wake,
gasping like a fish on the sand
left by some fisherman
too intent upon his next catch
to end it cleanly.

In its tight skin,
I gasp for air,
rise as it cannot rise
and like you cannot rise
out to that night sea air
which is the only coolness
in a month of burned days.

My memory, curving round,
pulls in the memory of you
like gills seeking to understand
the waterless air.

Landed by some bigger fisherman
whose bait you couldn’t resist,
“Oh,” you said, just “Oh,”
before you took the hook,
slipping from my grasp
as I held on, held on,
let go.

 

This is one of the poems in my book of 50 years of love poems  titled
If I Were Water and You Were Air, about to be published on Amazon.

Posted in response to the dVerse Poets Open Link Night.
See how others responded to the prompt HERE.

Happiness: NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 25

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IMG_3962

“Too much happiness or too much unhappiness render us
oblivious to any good or bad changes around us.” 
—Alka Girdhar

 Balance

Happiness, like sadness, takes up too much room—
like a greedy house guest usurping our closets with their excess.
What bride notices the homeless on her bridal route?
What new mother thinks first of the starving hidden half a world away?

Sadness, like happiness, eats up our world.
The hungry yearn first for bread,
the ill for surcease from pain.
Who feels the thorn may overlook the rose.

Life is balanced, not within each,
but within the all.
What seems unfair to the single eye
is perfect harmony for the all-seeing.

So much easier
for the fortunate to feel worthy of their lot.
to feel, somehow, that their place in the  world
was created just for them.

Do the cursed feel equally singled out for hunger, cold, pestilence and misery?
Does a master mason have an intended place for every stone?
Does a baker single out a single speck of flour for inclusion?
Is a bee instilled with life to pollinate a certain flower?

What kind consciousness could have borne the guilt
of thinking through a plan more specific than the overplan–
the functioning of the grand machine of the universe
wherein happiness and sadness
swing like a pendulum
that somehow balances all.

 

For NaPoWriMo: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

The Ticket: NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 24

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The Ticket

Because I could not stop for death,
three times it  let me pass,
but the reprieve it granted,
sadly will not last.

Frequently, it beckons,
choosing friend after friend
in a sad progression
I know will never end.

One day it will summon
and I can’t refuse to go.
I only hope that when it comes,
my passing won’t be slow.

Let us go then, you and I,
forgoing futile censure,
traveling without regrets
into this new adventure.

 

  • “Let us go then, you and I,” from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  • “Because I could not stop for Death, Emily Dickinson
    For NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 24

For NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 23

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The NaPoWriMo prompt was to create a new Superhero. This is my response.

No Can Do

Who needs another superhero? Aren’t there enough? 
Thinking up another one is going to be rough.
Of Doctors, Bats and Green ones, it seems we’ve had our fill,
and Possum Girl or Rat Boy doesn’t seem to fill the bill.
All heroic adjectives have already been used.
“Incredible” and “Super” I fear have been abused.
So what’s a gal to do when asked to make a new one?
I think that I must answer, it’s impossible to do one!!

Just for the record, I actually did create a superhero poem a few years ago for NaPoWriMo. If you’d like to check it out, HERE is a link.

This is an alphabetically ordered list of superheroes from  Encyclopaedia Britannica and DC Comics:

 

For NaPoWriMo Superhero prompt Image is a Marvel Stock image