We found all sorts of hidey holes in the front yard.
Is Mom watching? Oops. I’ll just hide again.
Truth of the Matter
Shy Creeps,
Sly Lurks
Shy, Creep and Lurk were the words for the Three Things Challenge today.
Daunting Pilgrimage
The raucous calls of prophet crows warn us of our error
in traveling down this moonlit road, thus augmenting our terror.
Our minds connect as voices recite their trembling prayers—
all our former evening plans now peeling off in layers
as one-by-one we zigzag from our predetermined path,
our former plans forgotten in the aftermath
of dreams of ghosts and goblins that await us up ahead.
The woods are dark and scary, adding to our dread
of the moving shadows and that macabre song
that trembles on the wind’s voice to hurry us along.
The silken touch of terror sends fingers down our spines,
reducing some among us to sniveling and whines.
Of the ten of us who started out, just five of us still here,
our group reduced one after one as our goal grew near—
an aged house much worn away with one feeble light
glowing through the darkness of this frightening night.
But as its door swings open, all five of us repeat
the words that break the horror of our journey, “Trick or treat!!!!”
For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 664 the prompt words are: sing trembling zigzag connected mind silk dreams moon prayers crow road prophets Image by Simon Berg on Unsplash.
ESCAPE
The door to the greatest house of all, the ocean’s edge,
tempts me to leave myself and enter.
This echo of the ocean is the dove in me
that carries the message that I want to fly.
Soaring dove, I want to ride on your back
to the crack of sunrise—to its flower.
To forget the lone compulsions
of the logic that has frozen me.
If I could let this hard time pass,
I might grow less diverted as my distance from it grows.
Time’s ricochet might drive me to the ocean’s rim,
revealing to me that I no longer want to toil.
The stress of guilt slows down
and if I choose to let it, falls behind.
Time will devour my past no matter how grand its scale––
revoke my sentence and set me free.
I will pass and repass it
on my round journey,
until my whole life
finally wears away.
For dVerse Poets Open Link Night. To see other poems for this prompt, go HERE.
AI image from dVerse Poets prompt.
Piecemeal
Two lives once pieced together
one day may come apart.
Who knows if time will loosen
that fine mosaic of heart
that happened after melding
two souls into one?
Even mighty continents
slowly come undone.
For dVerse Poets Pub. To see other submissions to this prompt go HERE. Mosaic by Alma Thomas
The Approach
The edges of my wishes wrap around my mind
over expectations of another kind
curling over “To Do” lists, jerking at their edges,
causing piled paper work to fall off bookshelf ledges,
breathing life into that void—that gap left in the middle
of all those daily tiresome tasks to leave some room to fiddle.
To look at curling banks of clouds that sail across a sky
so vast that I can’t count them, so I don’t even try.
Everything in life need not be a tiresome task.
Every day presents a time when I take time to bask
for at least a moment, or ten or twenty more,
in other natural treasures that lie outside my door.
Life seems to be speeding by, rushing toward its brink—
once stretched out before me, but soon over in a blink.
Ever conscious of those acts that I will leave behind me,
I wonder what life choices in the end will have defined me.
For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 662 the words are: jerk void breath gap vast blinked curling sky wish wrap edge ever
Judgment Day
I bury ominous secrets in a locked box, lose the key.
In their secret grave, I know they await me—
barren bits I’ve buried lest they clutter my life,
knowing, once revealed, they’d cut me like a knife.
Those riddles that most humans choose to drop into a grave,
each like a hibernating beast sleeping in its cave.
No one knows where to hunt for them except for just that one
who carries only memories now that that deed was done
and buried deep. The thud it made dropping into its nest
its one and final murmur as it joined the teeming rest
of hidden acts of anger, temper, greed and lust.
Dirty little secrets now turning into dust.
Buried and forgotten until that judgement day
when, perhaps, we all will be called upon to pay
for simply being human, and as humans must,
making bad decisions others might judge unjust.
But our severest critics might better atone
for those buried secrets of the past that are their own.
For Wordle 661 the words are: riddle hunt barren bits ominous thud grave keys box drop temper secrets
An ekphrastic poem is one that describes a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. For this exhibition, however, an artist was given a poem and asked to create a painting that reflected the themes of the poem. (To my knowledge, there is no term for this reversal of the ekphrastic process.) My poem about forbidden love is given below and above is the painting it inspired. Painting by Leonardo de Dios Jerónimoque, poem by me.
The show was the ExpoColoquio Internacional PreTextos del Solsticio held in Tabasco, Mexico, on June 20. I was honored to be a part of it. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, but a friend took the photo of the painting that was based on my poem. Below is its Spanish translation.
Adventure’s End
“Holy smoke!” the young man cries, pulling on the reins,
his heartbeats quickened, sending blood surging through his veins.
This glorious adventure—this quest across the plains,
fording raging waters, swollen by the rains,
seems to have turned against him as the arrow whizzes by,
shaving off his hat brim just inches from his eye.
He cradles fear, as weeping, he whips the plodding team,
prodding them to frenzy as though within a dream.
The bitter taste of panic, one brief surge of regret,
causes him to finally accept his sobriquet.
When his mother named him Chauncey which his dad shortened to “Chance,”
it signaled wild adventure and dangerous romance,
and as he set out on his travels to find fortune and fame,
not once did he consider the two sides to his name.
Now he rests forever beside that lonely road
that in his youth he thought would lead him to the mother lode.
For Sunday Whirl Wordle 660 the words are: holy plains waters beats travel weeping veins cradle rained taste brief glorious Image from Unsplash.
The Bread Train
When you hop aboard the bread train, there’s no negotiation.
Folks aboard the bread train become a congregation.
It’s a happy wagon, a life-fulfilling ride.
Everything comes easy when you are inside.
Don’t bother about lowlifes who wait along the tracks.
You can’t be responsible for everybody’s backs.
This trip through life is better if you have some dough.
These folks who have an easy ride everywhere they go?
That there may be enough for all is what they do not know.
They want no interference with the status quo.
If folks don’t have what they do, it’s just because they’re lazy.
Those who think the bread train crowd will feed them are just crazy!
Every riff-raff wannabe can’t have what he wants.
If he can’t afford the bread train, let him eat croissants!!
For dVerse Poets: Train
Go HERE to read more train poems!
Old Feelings
Our prairie town stood
in an unending stretch of South Dakota plain
that rolled on for as far
as any eye could see
with not one tree.
Here I dreamed
in the crouched shade of rabbit nests
and killdeer flight,
in the shade of the feigned broken wings of mother birds,
in the shade of tractor blades and haystacks.
This was where I would sunburn and sand stick and deer fly scratch.
Where the ticks waited for me on the wood of the thickets.
Where no dangerous animals lurked
since the gray wolves were ghosts
and the brown bears memories.
Here the Sioux were sequestered in the bars and the reservations.
The horses were safe behind fences,
the cattle wore the tattoos of their owners,
and feral cats were the only descendants left
in the decaying houses of the homesteaders
of half a century before.
The floorboards of my Grandmother’s homestead
sagged to the dry dirt,
and the roof and timbers
fell to blanket them.
The ribs of plows rusted
in the spring rainstorms.
Prairie fires burned away rust
and snow peeled away ashes
to the muscle of iron
which it picked at like scabs—
iron to rust to ashes to iron to rust.
Kicking the hard clods with my feet,
I knew that under me were arrowheads
and flint strikers
and white stone buttons
in the shape of thunderbirds—
All the rich Indian treasures
buried under the soil
to be turned up some day by the plow of my dad .
Curled up into the furthest corner of the couch,
I listened to the stories traded between my dad and his friends.
Tales of gray wolves
and children lost in snowstorms,
Indian wanderers and recluse homesteaders
to be lifted out of my dad
like he lifted the Indian relics from the soft soil.
And I feel a part of the prairie dogs and the wild kittens,
the rabbits and the killdeer in their nests.
I feel both threatened and protected by the land––
like a child given asylum under the shadow of trees.
Like myself sheltered in the arms of the child I’ve grown from.
That child who, wanting to grow up and feel less,
Comforts its grownup self, who wants the feeling back.
