Category Archives: Poem

Sangria Punch for dVerse Poets

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Sangria Punch

Take strawberries, about a cup.
Disinfect, then slice them up.
If you are a liquor lover,
pour tequila in to cover.
Overnight, just let them stew,
then add sangria to the brew
and add fresh orange juice to it
and 7up, more than a bit.

Then slice more strawberries to freeze
and add as many as you please
to pretty glasses picked for show
and put them neatly, row on row
upon the freezer shelf to chill,
ready for your guests to fill
with fresh sangria punch to kill!

For dVerse Poets Quatrain “Punch” Quatrain prompt. Recipe below in non-quatrain form.

1 or 2 cups sliced strawberries and peaches, too, if you wish
2 or 2 cups tequila to cover well
Soak overnight in tall glass pitcher. In the morning, add
1 quart Kirkland Sangria, 1/2 quart fresh orange juice.
When ready to serve, add 1/2 quart 7up, mix and pour over
frozen strawberries places in glasses in freezer to chill.
Adjust for tastes. I do every time. Amounts are approximate.
Store covered in fridge. It improves in flavor as it sits.


HERE is the original dVerse prompt.

Cautionary Tale

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Cautionary Tale

Before a flower you chance to pick,
pick a flower without  bees.
Bees sting painfully and so quick.
So, quick, you need to get the wound
wound tightly to dispel the pain.
Pain  you’d never have felt if only,
only you had looked before.

For the Murisopsis My Name Scavenger Hunt prompt–A Daisy Chain Poem

Floral Alphabet Challenge, The Letter “E,” and FOTD

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European Michaelmas Daisy
Euphorbia

If you choose to play along, please enter your link in my Floral Alphabet Challenge as well as in Cee’s FOTD.

Stick-in-the-Muds

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Stick-in-the-Muds

Obtuse folks with fondness for traditions of the past
consider a rendition that has a modern cast
as an indication that culture will not last,
confining their appreciation to their yesterdays,
designating mod designs as just another craze.
They sink into their easy chairs to mouth a loud “Ahem!”
not realizing  that their folks thought just the same of them.

Prompts for today are design, culture, fondness, obtuse, sink, rendition and indicative. IIlustration by Tim Kilby on Unsplash

Quilting Bee

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Mask quilt by Deanna Taylor
The good, the bad and the ugly. All part of life’s crazy quilt.
Pieces ready to be joined
Broken thoughts
African motif quilt by Deanna Taylor
Detail from mask quilt
This is a lovely poem written by my friend Isidro and painted on my wall. It is his version of a story I’d earlier written entitled “In Mexico There is Always Music.” We all keep contributing to each others’ stories.

(Click on photos to enlarge and to read the rest of the story.)

Quilting Bee

I chop my life up into bits, incongruous and varied:
struggles, victories, tragic loves, the day that I got married.
Clashes create beauty as pains mix up with cheers,
making a lovely pattern as each new piece appears.

In stories as in patchwork quilts, all bits are not roses.
Part of the beauty comes from the pain that it exposes.
We put our art together, fragment after patch
and no pattern emerges if all the pieces match.

A convenient truth of works of art as well as that of life:
beauty’s found in perfection, but also found in strife.
Sweet berries come with brambles and each rose has its thorn.
Both great passion and great pain predate the time we’re born.

Perhaps pain is the awful price that we have to pay
to experience the pleasure of when it goes away.
So with the ugly fabric that finds a place to fit
when contrasting beauty is stitched in next to it.

Life is a lovely story, but not all of it is writ.
Why were we created if not to add to it?
In taking all the pieces we’re provided with,
We take part in creation by adding to the myth.

 

 

Prompts today are patterns, chop, clashes, cheer, incongruous, convenient and brambles.

Family Secrets

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Family Secrets

The mayor’s precious daughter has that certain glow,
but why the groom is deadpan, no one will ever know.
That he prefers the maid of honor is the murky truth,
but to show his real emotions he knows would be uncouth.

Hand-picked by her father to assure his re-election,
this young man of fine lineage was an obvious selection.
He should have put his foot down, but their fathers were best friends
and his marriage to another would not meet those families’ ends.

So when future generations question Grandpa’s look
as they rifle through the pages of the family photo book,
they’ll guess the bachelor party had gone on for too long,
affecting the groom’s fitness and his wedding get-along.

Only two will ever know the real truth of the tale.
First, the maid of honor who smoothed her best friend’s veil,
and secondly the groom, who when he kissed the bride
imagined he was kissing the one who stood beside.

 

Prompt words today are glow, deadpan, election, murky, mayor, prefer and precious. Image from Pinterest.

Doorways

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Doorways

Dreams do not circumscribe, but let us wander forth and back,
defying time to travel through memory’s broad crack.

The profile of the present vanishes in rapid transit
without asking us if we are in the shape to chance it.

Our minds’ stately mansions turn to crackerboxes when
that unconscious part of us has a wild yen

to plunge us back into the past to deal with problems there
for which our earlier life gave us scant time to prepare.

Time and again we have the chance to live our lives in dreams,
resolving problems in a manner our subconscious deems

to be healthy solutions to what didn’t work before.
It is as though the elements opened up a door

and let us wander back again through time and distance vast
to give us all a second chance to rectify the past.

Reminding us that our old sorrows were not meant to last,
revising slightly all those roles to which we have been cast.

Time that once sifted slowly rushes through the hourglass,
assuring us of that set truth: that this, too, shall pass.

 

Prompts today are time travel, transit, profile, circumscribe, healthy, crackerbox and element. First photo by jdb, hourglass by Aron Visuals on Unsplash.

Homecoming

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Homecoming

All rivers led away from home, each highway, path and plane,
but little did I know that I would be led back again.
Memories pressed upon the page like flowers in a book.
Every story, every poem records a backwards look.

 

The prompt by dVerse Poets is to write a poem based on this amazing painting by  Lee Madgwick. See her other paintings here: leemadgwick.co.uk.
See other poems written to this promt HERE.

Traviesa

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Traviesa

My dog just ate my wood carving and that is why I need to vent.
Although I have looked everywhere, I can’t find its equivalent.
Sometimes she’s angelic, but at other times a pest.
I’ll leave it up to you which version I like best.

When she’s hushed and loving I fear that I’m forgetful
of all the other times when she’s mischievous and fitful.
I get up and go over to give her a fond pet,
but when I do I step upon a spot that’s slick and wet

and realize that once again she’s had a little pee
in a spot here in the living room she knows that I can’t see
when seated at my writing desk. My back to where she’s been,
I cannot be a witness to her most recent sin.

I know her name is Zoe, but too often I forget
the name that has been given to my most recent pet.
So I call her “Traviesa,” which pops into memory
for  “naughty girl” is what she is most frequently.

 

Prompts today are wet, fitful, angelic, equivalent, quotation, wood carving and hush.

 

Breakup Breakdown, for Wordle 569

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Breakup Breakdown

My tenacious efforts to climb that hard rock face
of the tower of your indifference has brought me great disgrace.

I regret my wasted journey  to regain your love.
What can’t be saved below can’t be re-won above.

My thoughts are swarming wildly like bees around their hive.
They crack my shell of reason. I’ve no wish to be alive.

Though I present a normal face, I’m not sane at all.
I grit my teeth and curl my broken body in a ball.

And though this seems to demonstrate that I am quite agile,
actually, it protects a heart that is most fragile.

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 569 prompt words are: regret wasted journey tenacious bees agile rocking climb crack teeth present face. Photo and brooch by jdb.

And…it’s fiction, Dolly!!!!