Category Archives: Poem

Spinning Top, for today’s Throwback Edition

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Spinning Top

Is senility a resurrected prenatal state—
hearing the outer world
with limited stages of connection?
Or is it a journey backwards through a lifetime,
remembering details pushed into
the closets of the mind by daily tasks?

The hum of a life is deafening in this world.
Even with earbuds or headsets,
the noise of the world streams in,
wired direct into our consciousness,
quelling thoughts of our own,
wiping clean for the time being,
memories.

The whole world with us every minute
leads to no world of our own.
Barraged our entire lives,
more now than ever,
does senility offer a time before our death
to connect with our inner selves once more?

Relieved of the world,
do we spin like a top into that inner world,
remembering a lifetime lost to activity—
the resurrected adolescence of old age
evolving backwards into a dreaming time
wherein we joyfully wander ourselves again?

Some choose the rope, fearing a nightmare of senility,
yet some of us hope for a return to dreams of childhood,
relieved of all care, even for ourselves.
No one comes back to tell us which it is,
yet some of us?
We hope.
We hope.

( First published on July 4, 2018)

Pretty Bottles All Lined Up for Word of the Day

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Pretty Bottles All Lined Up

How we love to line up bottles on tabletops or shelves.
What we collect in bottles tells us something of ourselves.
Be it pills or perfume or lotions for our skin,
be it liquor bottles or old bottles of our kin.
Be they for forgetting or remembering or curing,
the fact that we see into them is somehow reassuring.

Each bottle opened is no doubt considered well worth keeping,
as applied  or guzzled down, its contents we are reaping.
Hopes or dreams are bottled there––courage, allure or balm.
Their stoppers keep in secrets, unstopped they exude calm.
Pretty bottles on a shelf deserve felicitation
as they meet our eye to please us, or our lips for satiation.

The Word of the Day prompt is “Bottle Opener.”

Ten Years Ago Today: On Pants and Fences

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This is today’s look over the shoulder from Word Press: “Cracking open the content time capsule: Revisit your posts from this day, June 26.”

I chose a post I made on this date (June 26) in 2016:

Mending Wall and Mending Pants!!!

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I agree that “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, ” but fences, schmences.  Although the topic today is “Fences,” I think walls are close enough to fences–just a matter of material and “I have miles to go before I sleep” thanks to packing, purchasing, organizing  and copying things I need to take to the states on Wednesday, so taking the further risk of alluding to Robert Frost three times in three sentences, I am going to avail myself of a link to an old parody of “Mending Wall” (entitled “Mending Pants”) that I wrote 2.5 years ago before most of you had even heard of my blog.  I hope you enjoy it and approve the streeeeeetttttccchhhhh of the theme for today.  Guess you could call them stretch pants???

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Robert Frost seemed to have a thing about boundary markers.  “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” and “Mending Wall” are the most notable indicators of this.  Several years ago when I had only a few faithful followers, I wrote a parody on “Mending Wall” which I’d like to share with you again.  Judging from the likes, the faithful Angloswiss was my only present follower who read it and if some of you are like me, even if you read it two and a half years ago, you probably won’t remember it, so please indulge me and go here:
 https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/09/17/mending-pants-with-apologies-to-robert-frost/
and I’ll get on with my packing, ordering, xeroxing and house ordering for my housesitter.  Only three days to go!

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/fence/

 

“Frozen,” for dVerse Poets

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Image copied from dVerse Poets prompt

>Frozen<

Ice crystals clung to the naked branches like frozen fireworks,
their shafts capturing sunlight that outlined their million frozen rays.
It was like walking through a crystalline otherworld,
and she avoided brushing branches wih her shoulders,
not wanting to disturb nature’s artistry.

So it was with her memories of him.
The truth of their parting could not be allowed
to brush off their perfect beginning,
now frozen  forever in her mind.

for dVerse Poets

“Erasures Impossible” for The Three Things Challenge

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Erasures Impossible–Unless

If you are writing in a jiffy,
it may be your spelling’s iffy.
So, unless it doesn’t hurt
to have to scratch out and insert,
It would be wiser, don’t you think,
to write in pencil and not in ink?

For the Three Things Challenge  the words were: INK. INSERT IFFY

“Emptying” For Take A Look Back, June 22, 2016

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Recently, WordPress has started sending reminders of past blogs published on the current date. Here was a blog I published ten years ago on June 22:

Why don’t you do the same ? If you do, please put a link to this blog in comments below.

“The Toast” for The Sunday Whirl

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The Toast

He never lost his swagger, even toward the end.
As life tried to break him, the most he did was bend.
When death twisted its cruel blade and his life met its turning,
unholy thoughts consumed me and set my mind to churning.

Will the dead rise up again in search of former love,
or do our dear departeds find more holy lips above?
Does past love wave its banners and proclaim itself in spite
of the fact that one love stays below, completely out of sight?

Love’s table where we feasted has found another host,
and though I hover ’round its edges and listen to the toast
of another bride and bridegroom celebrating love that’s new,
instead, my lover who once was, I lift this glass to you.

For the Sunday Whirl 762 the words are: wave turning unholy lips swagger lost dead rise twist blade feast edges

Published on this date in 2019

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WordPress has started a new feature where they send us a reminder of every blog we published over the years on the present date.  This is what I published on June 19 in 2019:

I well remember that it took me much longer to format the poem than to write it, and in the original post, I showed earlier “shapes” for the poem before I settled on this one. I’ll spare you that here.  Was anyone around to read it when I first published the poem? If so, drop a line. In fact, drop a line even if you weren’t!

Insomnia Blues

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Image by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash, Used with permission.                 

Insomnia Blues

I turn up the volume, turn off the lights–
the beginning of one of my fruitless insights
into how to manage falling asleep
by listening to podcast sessions I keep
stored on my computer, backed up on my phone,
although I admit, in the dark, all alone,

I lie sleepless for hours, in spite of trying
various things to assist in my flying
off into dreamland. Music and books,
chants, meditations and other hooks
created to lull a person to dreams,
where I will not go in this lifetime,it seems.

Hour after hour, I try to snooze.
Light up a doobie, sip on some booze,
but nothing works, so as dawn lights my day,
I arise from my bed and I’m off and away
to attend Open Circle–– a weekly gathering
given to performances, lectures and blathering
on local issues. This week it’s my friend.

I find my seat. It’s first row, on the end.
Hear announcements of upcoming speakers and then
my very best friend. I hear her begin,
then fade into dreams, beginning to snore,
lean ever lower, end up on the floor.
So that sleep I’ve been praying for comes, in the end,
rudely, in public, as I lose a friend.

Today’s Word of the Day was “Volume.”

“I Have Memorized this Ceiling” for dVerse Poets

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I Have Memorized This Ceiling

I know these walls and ceiling well.
They have so many tales to tell.
When reality is not sufficient,
four walls can become omniscient—
opening to all the world,
as a thousand stories come unfurled.

Each timber’s knot and each plank’s burl,
each water stain—each mark and whirl
has an adventure kept inside.
It is a fast horse that I ride
speeding my self, so tightly curled,
out of this prison, into the world.
A woman’s silhouette—so grand
has been sketched out by water’s hand.

Wood its canvas, it paints her free,
her story known by none but me.
The little dog—her friend and guide
when planks were cut, was found inside
that living tree, first cut, then milled
that my mind’s meanderings have filled
with all the stories that would be mine,
born in another place and time.

Those held prisoner by caste
or by our sex, held sure and fast—
imprisoned by life’s machinations,
escape in our imaginations.
Thus it is that fantasy
is the thing that sets us free.
The lock that holds us, rope that binds
cannot corral our restless minds.

I’ve memorized these walls, this ceiling,
imbued them with all of the feeling
lacking elsewhere in my life.
They are my husband. I am their wife.
Those water stains are flowers placed
to relieve sorrows I have faced.
Those hollow eyes stretched wide in terror,
the tree cannot have grown in error.

They are messages to me
that somewhere, something watches me.
They record and comfort one
who, worn out when her day is done,
spreads out her body on her cape
and looks up for her day’s escape.
A private world for my invention,
far from my life’s cruel convention.

I’d tell the whole world if I could,
these stories nature has etched in wood.
Instead, my stories I remand
to whatever high command
guides whatever reprimands
these unfair acts of human hands
bring to themselves. We cannot know
the greater plan from here below.

For 14 years, I lived in a high-ceilinged all redwood house. The wood ceiling and walls were what I viewed every morning and evening as I woke up or lay trying to sleep. I used that imagery as though being observed by another woman, somewhere in the world, imprisoned due to caste, sex, or other conditions of her life.

For dVerse Poets Open Link #410