Category Archives: Poem

“Vitiligo” for Esther’s Writing Prompts

6 Replies

Vitiligo*

Mighty sol’s ubiquitous in regions that are tropical,
but when it comes to sunlight, I have news that is more topical.
I’m evidence empirical that all folks aren’t created
to lie out in the sun’s rays until their lust is sated
for skin transposed to honey brown from a whitish hue.
For folks like me, such practices simply will not do.

Unlike my lucky college chums, my best friends and my sister,
when I’m exposed to sunlight, I am more prone to blister.
I see them put their swimsuits on and take turns rubbing oil on,
anxious to go greet the sun to get their bake and boil on,
but once they’re spread out on their towels with all adjustments made,
I’ll be covered up instead, sitting in the shade.

*Vitiligo is a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes patches of skin to lose pigment or color. This happens when melanocytes – skin cells that make pigment – are attacked and destroyed, causing the skin to turn a milky-white color. People with vitiligo have no natural protection from the sun.

The prompt for Esther’s Writing Prompts this week is “Shade.”

“Sparrow’s Song” for Sunday Whirl

1 Reply

 

Sparrow’s Song

Sparrows that stretch their wings out and flutter branch to branch
migrate for the winter to the barn at Daddy’s ranch.
I ring a bell and they emerge from their hidden places.
Some flutter to my back as I bend down to tie my laces.
I stretch my arm to spread their seed, then try to stand real still
as they execute crash landings to land and  eat their fill.
Others fidget up above, lining the barn’s high beam,
like substitutes awaiting their chance to join the team.
Ferrets  slinking through the hay , their teeth as sharp as lances
keep close watch on wings and beaks, waiting for their chances
to pounce on unsuspecting birds, so memories once sweet
given darker endings, may mean nostalgia’s defeat.

Word menu for the Sunday Whirl this week is: sparrows bell migrate emerge flutter still stretch slinking memories branches fidgeting crash

Out-Joked for SOCS

10 Replies

BACK GARDEN1

Out-joked

Everyone must know a joker––
plotter, trickster, laugh-provoker
who doesn’t know quite when to stop.
Who needs, in fact, a humor cop
to tell him when he’s done enough––
pulled his ultimate ruse or bluff.

The dribble glass, the rubber poop
placed upon your house’s stoop?
Definitely adolescent
if not actually prepubescent.
Yet still this buffoon thinks he’s funny.
With lists of jokes, he’s over-punny.

Every occasion, every rumor
is met by him with off-base humor.
It’s his role to create sensation
in the most serious conversation.
Exploding cigars, salty gum,
whoopee cushions ‘neath your bum.

No matter how you beg this friend
to bring these antics to their end,
he never seems to listen to
what he’s requested to “not” do.
so when he streaked my garden party,
elegant, refined and arty,

he finally found himself undone
when he’d half-completed his naked run.
Dear friend, when you chose where you stepped,
you should have veered or should have leapt.
When he replaced your rubber poo,
my dog just pulled a joke on you!

 

The SOCS prompt is “Joke.”

Graffiti, for The Sunday Whirl

17 Replies

 

Click on photos to enlarge.

Graffiti

Some viewers lift their glasses and drink to genius that
gave birth to every brush stroke. Each dribble and each splat.
They say these shocking images awaken us to see
much more than just one artist’s route to immortality.

Others blame the artist who has had the gall
to spray art uninvited upon a public wall.
They say raw art does nothing to put out raging fires.
Solutions to world problems are not what art inspires.

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl are: drinks fire wake catastrophe shocking say social drastic world art raw blame

“Forked Tongues” for Weekend Writing Prompt

10 Replies

 

Forked Tongues
These messengers speak words
that can slap you awake,
then abandon you
as they return
to the problems
of the privileged rich.

For Weekend Writing Prompt: Speak (limited to 22 words)

Cleanup Crew for SOCS

9 Replies

Not dead..just stuffed full and taking a rest.

Cleanup Crew

They eke their living out of our scraps
purloined while we are taking naps
or out for walks or just aren’t looking––
so intent upon our cooking
that we fail to see them scamper
(from where they hide behind the hamper)
out to gather crumbs they seek.
But instead, they prompt an “Eek”
as Mom goes one way, they the other
off to find, they hope, another
kitchen where the cook’s more willing
to ignore their needs for filling
rodent jaws and rodent tummies
with some errant human yummies.

The SOCS prompt is eek/eke

“Wordless” for Word of the Day.

10 Replies

Wordless

I wish that I could wow you with putting prompts to rhyme,
but I seem not to be able to do so at this time.
“Amplify’s” been silenced and refuses to fight back,
while its potential author is revealed as just a hack.

It seems my old acuity at making words behave
has somehow deserted me, branding me a knave.
The truth that I am lacking in *vocabular agility
has left me slightly flummoxed with a new vulnerability.

(*For all I know, some lexicographer’s already dissed
my coinage of a brand new word the dictionaries missed.)
This poet, once ferocious, has been worn down by time.
and I’m thinking in my next life I might come back as a mime.

The Word of the Day prompt is:  “Amplify.”

Dateless Saturday Night for dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge

30 Replies

Dateless Saturday Night

Her face an apparition
in the mirror of
her window,
she sits alone, apart from the
cool crowd,
plucking  petals.
“He loves me. He loves me not.” 
Her hand holds one more piece
too many,
the whole world
plucked nodes
on an empty 
stem.  

The prompt word for the dVerse Poets quadrille challenge is: petal.

“The Stilled Song of Sparrows” For the Sunday Whirl Wordle

8 Replies

The Stilled Song of Sparrows

Babbling sparrows exiled to the dark of sheltering barns
pipe and cheep their language, dispensing avian yarns
of escapes from snakes and alley cats as slingshots of small boys
hands guided by piped bird speech and focused on their noise,
take focus in the shadows, fitting stones purloined from lots
of building stones and gravel into their leather slots,
then bark their childish pleasure as each missile meets its mark,
and they send their willing pet dogs to retrieve them with a bark.
Rapping their childish pleasure, brushing water from still wings,
when the rain stops, they  go on to other childish things. 

 

 

Prompt words for the Sunday Whirl Wordle are: hands brush water sparrows snake babbling slot rap piped bark exiled speech
image by Mihail Tregubov on Unsplash.

“Dental Discourse” for Word of the Day

1 Reply

Dental Discourse

 

Dental Discourse

She could not stand the sad sad sight
of his horrendous overbite.
She arranged to take him to a
dentist, thinking he could do a
makeover.

She asked the doc what he would charge
to make his overhang less large.
The price he set to make each tooth less
was, I fear, greedy and ruthless
overkill.

Thus began their drawn-out dicker
that I think would have gone quicker
if his teeth had been less icky,
and the job a much less tricky
overhaul.

After much talk, they struck a deal,
both thinking that they’d made a steal.
But then with little else to do,
she said  if he attempted to
overcharge,

she would have his license lifted
no matter how bloody gifted
he might have been (when this all ends)
at cutting down her toothy friend’s
hangover.

 

The “Compound Word” verse form  consists of 5  five-line stanzas with aabb rhyme schemes, each containing 8 syllables and each stanza concluding with a three-syllable compound word that has one element the same as all other compound words in the final lines of the stanzas. Phew!

The Word of the Day prompt was Dentist.