Category Archives: Poem

Eternal Is

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Sacred Heart

Eternal is a mist that doesn’t lift.
It is a wish, a sigh, a dream, a promise made,
a promise kept. A goal for some, for others
a dark cloud that will not lift.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow,
what we make of this life
makes eternity.
We can blame it on no other.
Gods do not make eternity
but only furnish directions
often misinterpreted
or lost to time.
Look within
to find it,
for it is neither there
nor there.

 

For: Tuesday Writing Prompt: Eternal 7: 06

and https://godoggocafe.com/2021/11/16/tuesday-writing-prompt-challenge-tuesday-16-2021/

Two Poems of Silence for WQWWC 94

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 In answer to Martha’s “Silence” prompt, I am including links to two poems I’ve dedicated to silence. See the link to her post at the end. Don’t miss it!

The Silence of the Iambs

Our Mother, Cloaked in Silence (Daily Post and dVerse Poets Rhyme Royal)

Be sure to click on Marsha’s incredible post (As silent as a falling leaf”, thoughtful as a man with a dream,”  by clicking on her link here: WQWWC 49

Image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash.

The Rocky Road to Maturity

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The Rocky Road to Maturity

A state of ataraxia is simply not the norm
when a particular condition has taken you by storm.
It makes you feel ungainly and your customary grace
seems to gather syllables and turn into disgrace.

Moodiness and hormones and pimples and the rest
of the ills that mark this state don’t put you at your best,
and there’s a bigger problem once you survive your pubescence,
for it is just a prelude to the state of adolescence!

 

Word prompts today are customary, ungainly, prelude, ataraxia (tranquility) and particular.

Categories of Terror

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Categories of Terror

Footsteps behind you in a midnight park
or the sentence of standing center stage.
A shadow, darker, moving through shadows,
that one voice, remembered, calling your name.

Echoes that follow you through the years.

Only one terror worse.
Alone in the whole wide world.
No more morality or fame or love or blame.
Now, what is the purpose of your being?

For dVerse Poets: Epiphany

 

 

 

A Cautionary Tale

Please click on photos to enlarge and read the tale.

Boats were nestled in among the water hyacinth.
After initial problems stepping into the muck to get into the boat, all started out smoothly enough.
Could it possibly have been due to a series of impossibly low mangrove limbs that because of the high water were only inches above the top edge of our boat? Yes, indeed, we went under at least four trees like this that extended completely across the channel, as well as a low-hanging footbridge. And then got to repeat the experience on the way back. For now, trips through the mangroves are definitely not for sissies. We earned our gin and tonics that night!!! (Look again, now. All of those low-lying trunks of trees pictured were ones we had to fit under!


A Cautionary Tale

As you paddle down life’s dreams, 
beware of hazards in its streams.
Currents quicken and their speed
may your expertise exceed.

Beware of whirlpools or of bogs,
floating hazards: moss and logs.
All the pretty scenery—
the mountains, flowers, greenery,

might distract you from the task,
so this one promise I must ask.
Agog with all of life’s sweet treasures,
please mind the thorns within its pleasures.

Prompt words today are paddle, hazard, quicken, agog and speed.

I’ve shown these photos before, but they fit in so well with the theme of this new poem that I just had to use them again.

Last Leaf

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Last Leaf

I’m losing all my scruples, in fact, it’s true. I sold
my gram’s old cornucopia, so lovely and so old.
If this is a measurement of how I’ve come to scorn
all those family heirlooms to which I have been born,
I guess I must admit you’re right.  Something inside of me
has made me forsake memories of the family tree.

Too many leaves have fallen. That tree is stripped and bare,
and those family treasures all show such signs of wear
that seeing them depresses me, thinking of all the hands
that they have been passed  down from, and all the foreign lands
they have been transported through to make their way to me—
the single stubborn leaf that clings persistently

to the branch they all were part of before their final fall,
so now I am the final remnant of them all.
That’s why I’m selling all the things that bind me to their line,
refining my possessions down to what’s just mine,
shedding off my past in a selling spree frenetic,
thinking if I rid myself of all those ties genetic,

that perhaps the past that draws me will lose its hold on me
and that giving up what joins us will finally set me free.
Then I’ll flutter here forever, almost weightless on my branch,
hopeful that this freedom of possessions is a chance
to become immortal, unencumbered by the vast
downward force of  gravity that pulls me from the past.

Today’s prompts are scruple, sold, measurement, cornucopia. I‘ve been waking up earlier and earlier with the result being that some of the prompts are not yet posted, so one of these prompts is a prompt I missed earlier in the week for the same reason and another prompt seems to have stopped posting, so  I am minus one prompt. if anyone reading this knows of a different prompt site, I’m looking for another one. Ones I’ve been using are Ragtag Daily Prompt, Fandango’s One-Word Challenge, The Daily Spur, Word of the Day Challenge and Your Daily Word.

Marriage of Mind

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Marriage of Mind

You weave between the spaces that the world has left—
The filler to my emptiness, the warp to all my weft.
I’m made stronger by your presence. You always have my back—
solving all my puzzles and lessening the flak
of the world’s abuses in between its pleasures.
You share its grief just as you’ve helped me celebrate its treasures.
We weave a pretty story, devoid of plan or theme.
We play the game together without joining any team.
Our story is unwritten. It’s not epic or historical.
The union that I talk about is merely metaphorical.

Prompt words today are team, weft, flak, historical and abuse.

Smiths

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Smiths

Like a seal or fish or otter
slips into its world of  water,
so do smiths of any sort—
(word or metalsmith) cavort
in their shops or in their minds
to create wonders of two kinds.

The smith’s returns of mind or hammer,
while they may create a clamor
by their constant stimulation,
forge in us a strong sensation,
opening our minds and eyes
to thoughts formerly in disguise.

Never underestimate
those born to shape and malleate.
They build our knowledge, blow on blow,
to show us different ways to go.
The words or metal that they wrangle
into book or silver spangle,
swell the whole world’s education,
then add to its decoration.

Prompt words today are  spangle, malleate,  otter, sensation and return.

Rosehips

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Prairie Rose

Prairie Rose, sister of mine,
here at a distance,
I imagine you in full bloom
before your long winter.

I gather the best parts of you close in memory,
taking care with your acicula, as I have my whole life,
wondering why you seemed to need those parts
that kept us from clutching you too closely.

I thank you for seeding the future of our line.
Your grandchildren, the harvest of your life,
playful as otters even in their twenties,
award your existence by theirs.

We bring you with love back to where you came from,
 scatter your fallen petals
on the prairie loam,
and shovel it over that you may join it.

In case you didn’t know it, as I didn’t, “acicula” are needlelike parts: thorns, spines, bristles, or needlelike crystals. The singular form is  “aciculum.”

The rose hips are where the rose seeds are contained. Not doing any deadheading of the old rose blooms will allow the rose hips to form, which can then be harvested either to use the seeds inside to grow a new rose bush. Rosehips may be eaten, taking care to avoid the hairs that line the inside of the fruit and often times cover the seeds. They are literally itching powder and uncomfortable enough when they come into contact with your skin, let alone ingesting them!

Word prompts today are otter, shovel, harvest, acicula and mine.

Word Witch: Sunday Whirl Wordle 526, Nov 7, 2021

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Word Witch

Secrets I have kept for years,
known only by my closest peers,
have been exposed again, it seems,
recovered from my deepest dreams.

I blink my eyes. Words come to light.
I tap my toes and they take flight,
perch on the page to paint a scene,
attract more words to go between.

Words meeting words, no more alone,
flesh to flesh and bone to bone,
in a sort of minuet,
mesh with words that they’ve just met.

They are the stuff of darkest night,
a glass that shatters in the light
filled with words that I drink in.
These words reveal where I have been,

and maybe where I’m going to—
word by word and clue by clue,
a sample of what I have hidden
that comes alive when it is bidden.

I quaff some more, this lust for word
and word and word grown most absurd.
A’s and M’s and L’s and Z’s
flow from my lips onto the keys.

Too soon I know that I will wake.
Exposed to light, the glass will break,
the words it holds evaporating,
ones that might have come abating.

Is it witchcraft or illusion?
My soul alone or in collusion?
We cannot know if words it gave us
are what damn us or what save us.

The prompt words are glass, blink, words, alone, paint, eyes, tap, secret, light, years, meeting and sample.

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 526