Category Archives: Poetry by Prescription

Party of Twelve

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The Prompt: Seat Guru—You get to plan a dinner party for 4-8 of your favorite writers/artists/musicians/other notable figures, whether dead or alive. Who do you seat next to whom in order to inspire the most fun evening?

I chose twelve guests, plus myself. The seating chart is below. You will have to imagine me sitting in the exact middle of the table shaped like a ring around me.

Dinner for 12 seat chart

Party of Twelve

I have planned the dinner party, set the table, cooked the food,
but decisions about seating charts is ruining my mood;
for I want to sit by everyone, hear every conversation,
and trying to choose only two is causing consternation.
I think, therefore, I’d put me on a chair right in the center
on a sort of lazy Susan so I’d be able to enter
every conversation and to listen in on all,
seeing how they fare just like a fly upon the wall.

I’d have a little foot pedal to spin me at my ease—
enjoy Chaucer with my salad and Jane Austen with my cheese.
Jesus Christ and Whoopi could gang up on Rush and tell
why he’s the one who’s going to be broadcasting in Hell.
Osama bin Laden would be seated ear-to-ear
with Mohammed who would tell him what all terrorists should hear:
that the truth of the religion has got lost along the way,
for no one who is enlightened wants to kill and burn and slay.
Steve Martin would be there for fun to loosen up Osama
and spar with Rush to get his mind off Hillary and Obama.

I’d ask two people from real life to join us at the table:
Doug between the prophets so he’d finally be able
to be faced with the real men so he can sort out fact and fiction
and show it’s the religions that have caused us all the friction.
The men themselves had peace at heart and must bemoan the end
that power brokers bring the world to as their truth they bend.

The other person that I want to have here at my meal
is Ann Garcia, for I know her pleasure would be real.
Seated by Jane Austen, she would question her and tell
of her appreciation of the books she’s loved so well.
Barbara Kingsolver I’d seat upon on her other side.
She, too, would get much praise but also would have to abide
many interruptions from one listening from the middle,
for I’d be hopping back and forth like water on a griddle.

These people all are here because my curiosity
is whetted by my fantasies of what I’ll hear and see.
There is another guest that I’ve neglected to reveal,
but he is central to the plot of this illustrious meal.
Geoffrey Chaucer would be there to listen and relate
the story of this group of people that we love and hate.
So all the world could hear the tale of what we learned at table.
This earliest father of literature is surely the most able
to see the truth of character and spin a tale to tell
the truth of what will save our world from fire, brimstone, Hell!

And then, one final person I’d invite to be a guest
is Barbara Walters, who would come to interview the rest;
so we’d be sure that all received their moment in the sun,
and we could question them after her interview was done.

If you have any questions that you’d like an answer to,
most happily, I’ll ask them and pass answers on to you.
I will not mind a bit assuming this laborious task.
Just comment on this poem and say what you would like to ask
of Chaucer or of Jesus or of Whoopi or of Steve.
If they’re still here, I’ll ask them, or if they have chosen to leave,
I’ll channel them in poetry and say what I believe
they’d say if your request were one they could themselves receive.
But for now our party’s over and our guests have all departed.
Many better-fed, and (let’s hope) some more open-hearted!!!

P.S. The number of guests at my dinner party is coincidental. In no way is this poem meant to allude to another illustrious dinner of twelve plus one.

P.P.S.  Oops..Barbara Walters somehow got bounced off the seating chart.  I guess I’ll give her my seat and I’ll just roam around the perimeter, helping my sister serve the soup, but mostly just listening in and butting in. So this really should be called “Party of Thirteen.” I also had Will Rogers on my original seating plan, but he was somehow omitted.  It was my first time using the program that created the seating chart and it took me longer to get it together than to write the entire poem. Sorry Will, I’ll catch you later.  Perhaps devote an entire poem to you.

 

 

Old Friends

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I was running from the time I woke up this morning until about 10:15 tonight. My guests have now gone and I’ve had 45 minutes to work on this prompt. It certainly isn’t my favorite, but I felt compelled to finish the assignment, lest it be the first day since April 1 that I failed to post! So, for what it is worth, here’s my near-answer to today’s prompt!!! Please note that much as you might feel you see yourself in this poem, the characters are purely fictional!!!

Today’s Prompt: Long Exposure—Among the people you’ve known for a long time, who is the person who’s changed the most over the years? Was the change for the better?

Old Friends

Our world turns and all of us
without much fanfare or much fuss
change constantly from day to day
in such a subtle sort of way,
we barely notice we have changed
until we find we are estranged
from those once near who now are far,
reaching for a different star.

While once we shared the usual aim
of husband, family or fame,
each thinks the other achieved less
though neither one could ever guess
that each achieved just what she wanted
sailing through her life unhaunted
by regrets of what she’s missed:
the shore unclaimed, the cheek unkissed.
One scored the ring and husband first.
The other sought to quench her thirst
for travel and remained unmarried
satisfying interests varied
from what most others chose to do—
each year her world began anew.

No little hand in hers, no need
to clothe and comfort, wash and feed
anyone except herself.
She sat alone upon the shelf
of life, unchoosing and unchosen—
well-preserved and slightly frozen.

The other birthed, lifted and carried
in a life both full and harried.
With kids and husband in her home,
she was rarely there alone.
Kept busy by her obligations
to neighbors, friends and her relations,
her life proceeded till near its end,
she chanced to come upon her friend
from long ago and tarried there
while both of them let down their hair.

Each found the place where she belonged
and neither feels unduly wronged.
One found her place in family—
contented in their company.
The other is quick to aver
she found her place inside of her.

No Fear

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No Fear

We know within our hearts that personality
often cancels out what we can clearly see.
We all have known the men who, homely to the eye,
still have personalities sweet as cherry pie,
who win the ladies with their charm and humor that is wry,
causing them to line up for chances with this guy.

And the girl who’s plain until she starts to talk—
her face just so enlivened, you have to stand and gawk.
Made lovely by expression, intelligence and wit,
“beautiful” and “lovely” become the words that fit
when trying to describe this attractive little lass
who simply doesn’t bother with a looking glass.

Both have learned to conquer all their crippling fear—
to find the other side of doubt and kick it in the rear.
To face the world on their own terms and face it unafraid.
To take their rightful placement at the front of the parade.
But though we see what they have done, we do not always take
the road that for another seems to be a piece of cake.

You may find this poem to be most adolescent,
yet the feelings of our past most usually are present
throughout our lifetimes, though we seem to hide what we must feel,
leaving it to novelists and poets to reveal
the truths of all our agonies, the facts of all our fears—
all those things we’ve meant to face but yet hold in arrears.

I long ago discovered that writing must be true.
The only worthwhile topics are the things that bother you.
The lacks you find in others and the lacks within yourself
are what divide the poems in hand from poems on the shelf.
And so I must admit that fear’s my greatest hidden vice.
And since we all could do with taking our own sage advice:

I’ll say that with no fear, I would burn candles at both ends—
be as free with lovers as I am with friends.
I would have burned fingers, but an unbound heart.
All those lovely men, disregarded from the start
because I was too zaftig or not smart enough?
I’d face them nose-to-nose, and then I would call their bluff.

Today’s Prompt: Fearless Fantasies—How would your life be different if you were incapable of feeling fear? Would your life be better or worse than it is now?

Unwrapped Packages

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Unwrapped Packages

It is the difference between that present handed to you
by a person who says, “It’s only a tie,”
and a package under the tree
squeezed and prodded at—perhaps a corner loosened
or a hole poked in through supposed accidental handling,
pondered like a good detective show.

Who wants these mysteries revealed before their time?
What value in the present whose contents you already know for sure?
The magic of Christmas for some is that faith that the girl,
untouched by human lover, gave birth—and it is that sort of faith
that “saved” the world. If we knew the whole truth of that story
would all it prompted fall into the hole covered all these years by mystery?
The whole world seems to be standing more on what we don’t know
than on what we absolutely know empirically—what we can prove.

And so I look at the picture of my young mother
in her cotton housedress and saddle shoes
holding her baby in front of her in her stroller,
whole contraption, child and carrier,
a foot or two above the ground,
and there is mystery in the reveal.
I do not hear what transpired to cause this pose.
I do not know if my father caught her carrying me
from the porch to sidewalk and said,
“Here, Tootie, turn around,” and snapped the picture,
or whether my older sister planned the pose.
Or whether some movie star was snapped in a similar scene
and my mother and sister, like two conspiring fans,
planned the shot to steal the glamor formerly reserved
for “Photoplay” or “Look” or “Life.”

There would be no reel-to-reel
in any normal person’s life for years.
No movie camera to tell me exactly what my mother was like
or my sister or me before my memory took hold and even then,
my mind’s remembrance
more like reflections in a lake that color and change
depending on the clouds or rain,
distorting the light like moods.
My Aunt Peggy’s house,
always remembered as feeling like
the color chartreuse,
and I will never know why.
That smell of a friend’s house that became associated
with her memory more than any concrete proof of reel-to-reel
or spinning film of movie camera.

I do not know my mother’s voice at thirty.
I did not witness myself since birth
by either sound or sight.
There is a different mystery
to a past caught
in boxes of Kodacolor prints
curling and yellowing in a closet
than one documented like a science experiment
with every event taped and filmed.

Where does the mystery of you reside when you see yourself
so clearly, as others have seen you all along?
What does it leave for you to try to discover?
No tapes.
No film.
No Internet.
No Skype.
No YouTube.
No home movies.
All of our pasts were once wrapped up forever.
Only our fingers poking in the edges.
Only our voices asking,
“What was it like the day when I was born?”
What do you remember about the day when. . . .?

The Prompt: Can’t Stand Me—What do you find more unbearable: watching a video of yourself, or listening to a recording of your voice? Why?

The Brick Throwers

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The Prompt: Reviving Bricks—You just inherited a dilapidated, crumbling-down grand mansion in the countryside. Assuming money is no issue, what do you do with it?

The Brick Throwers

They were five in a chain from truck to rooftop,
each throwing the piles of adobe bricks
in stacks of four, from hand to hand
up from the bottom of the truckload
now nearly emptied.
Two of them waved me on
when I tried to park near,
my trunk full of heavy wall sculptures
to deliver to a gallery just half a block away.

And when I tried to park farther along the block,
again and again, they waved me away
until I was a block away and safe, I guess,
from straying bricks or errant cars that swerved
too far to the right to avoid the bricks or truck that held them.
They were a cheerful lot, and when I passed,
walking towards the gallery
carrying one sculpture after another,
they waved, and on my final trip back to the car,
again, the man second in the chain
who stood balanced on the highest level of the brick pyramid
that remained within the truckbed,
seemed to intuit my purpose, waving from me to them
as I drew my camera from my purse.
They all posed for minutes, miming their labor
as I tried to get them to actually throw, as before,
those piles of bricks, hoping to catch them
flying through the air between two pairs of hands.

Finally understanding, they threw and threw,
asking me for a prompt to help me catch that flight
I feared I’d never catch.

(more)

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Minutes later, I turned to leave
and they, cheering and smiling in their fame,
turned back to that labor which is an art in Mexico:
giving bricks wings before mortaring them
into a permanency that holds them rigid for lifetimes
until they crumble back into that soil that was their nativity.

This poem should be a metaphor for something
and probably is.
Some future day, when I am moldering in my grave
like some lesser Ozymandius,
some graduate student or scholar of mediocre
Twenty-First-Century poetry might publish a treatise
revealing it.
And they will dig this website from the rubble
of the Internet and find
I wrote it as a daily prompt
and if such records still exist,
find how I hired those men to build a monument
from that crumbling manse of brick
that was my prompt on the Daily Post
and tell how they spent their lifetimes restoring it
and how their children and their children’s children
have benefited from catcalls
and instructions to move on down the line
and the clicking of a camera lens
and from one who follows blindly
where each prompt leads her.

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Laughter Schmafter

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Laughter Schmafter

I used to roll with laughter most every day or so.
My parties were all riotous. No one would ever go
back home again till two or three or four or five or six.
And some would stay for breakfast, prerhaps hoping that I ‘d fix
my special chocolate waffles or orange berry strudels
or curried eggs or cheesy pie or strata made with noodles.
We’d story-tell and play charades and I admit, we’d drink
and stage our paper yacht races within the kitchen sink.
The guests might come in costume and some might bring a friend
for I had grown notorious for parties with no end.
When I was a teacher, I’d invite the whole darn staff.
Away from school, our hearts were gay. We dearly loved to laugh!
But this was years ago, my friend. Our hearts were young and gay.
Now that we’ve lived past sixty, we live a shorter day.
When I have my friends over to play a game or dine,
some find the spices don’t agree and others shun the wine.
Some have little dogs at home they have to feed by five.
Others have eye problems and find they cannot drive
after dark at all and so they have to leave by seven.
I guess our laughter’s done on earth. Perhaps we’ll laugh in heaven.

Daily Prompt: Roaring Laughter—What was the last thing that gave you a real, authentic, tearful, hearty belly laugh? Why was it so funny?

Prompt? Really?

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Prompt? Really?

I wake at six and for two hours and I check and check and check.
Now 8:03 and still no prompt. I wonder, what the heck?
Can they not post the prompt so I can get on with my day?
These lazy daily prompters must be laid out in the hay
when they should be here prompting for we still have things to do!
We can’t just sit here all day long to wait and wait for you.
Just slap some words down on your site and we’ll begin to write.
For we’ve been waiting morning hours and others through the night.
In the hours we’ve waited, we have stretched and paced and stomped
and realized the truth: Your prompt is anything but prompt!!!

Finally, at 11:13, today’s prompt was posted, but I had written my blog entry between the hours of six and eight and then watched for the actual prompt to post so I could establish the link.  Alas, 5 hours of waiting was enough and today I’ll post to a different drummer!  But—I was the first to post!!!!  Ta Dah!

The prompt today, when it finally came, was if you had three wishes to grant, who would you grant them to?  No necessity for thinking about this.  I would grant one each to three women who because of the culture they have grown up in have been sentenced to death for adultery or  because they have been raped or because they have stood up to a brutal husband.

Ocean Rental

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Ocean Rental

Her towel is spread out on the beach, the cat is on the stoop.
The housewife sips her coffee while her husband sips his soup.
There are advantages to houses built upon the sand.
You do not have to leave your porch to get expertly tanned.
You dine on tuna every day that never has been canned.
When fishermen jerk in their fish and they happen to land
upon your porch, you eat them either cooked or sushi-raw.
The fisherman cannot complain, you see it is the law.
And that is how you know what hubby shoves into his face
is probably not vichyssoise, but rather bouillabaisse

The Prompt: An Odd Trio—Today, you can write about whatever you what — but your post must include, in whatever role you see fit, a cat, a bowl of soup, and a beach towel.

Obscured Fourth

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Obscured Fourth

In Mexico, it is the rainy season
and so the rain falls down.
The dogs refuse to leave their beds.
They curl instead, and I do, too,
listening to the steady drip of rain from tejas
and Pasiano’s more massive splashes
as he scoops water from the tub
which never empties,
constantly replenished
by the rains.

Now hot water streams
from pipes into the hot tub.
Mineral water heated by volcanic fire
steams as it meets cool water falling
from above and the cool air that carries it.

It is still morning, but even tonight I’ll find
no fireworks in Mexico on the Fourth of July,
for independence was not granted evenly around this world.
And I who love the fertile darkness of night,
but also love surprises
that the fireworks bring,
must patiently wait for independence to find
this new country I found 13 years ago.

No rains ever mar her independence
on September 16.
The rainy season over,
all necks will crane in the churchyard crush
to see the wild castillo
and its corona spinning, spinning
to lift off into the air above—
independence held back until finally
it cannot help but rise
to freedom.

Note: September 16 is Grito de Dolores (Mexico’s Independence Day)

The Prompt: It’s Your Party—Since many are marking their country’s “birthday” in the US today, we wanted to ask: How do you celebrate yours? Are you all for a big bash, or more of a low-key birthday boy/girl?

If Only I Could Play Guitar

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Today’s (Jan. 8, 2015) WordPress Daily Prompt is: I Got Skills – If you could choose to be a master (or mistress) of any skill in the world, which skill would you pick? Oh, to play the guitar! But I already wrote to that subject last July. Here is that post.

If Only I Could Play Guitar

At times when now I only hum,
I’d pull out my guitar and strum;
and by the time that I’d be done,
completing my last pluck and run,
perhaps whoever sees and hears
would be reduced to sobs and tears
by every perfect tone and note,
the sentiments that I emote,
and tender lyrics that they knew
because of course I wrote them, too.

But I would be so humble still,
(my hubris would be less than nil)
that when they laud me at the Grammys,
I’ll be home curled up in my jammies—
still unaffected by my fame,
astonished at my new acclaim!

And when Bob Dylan asks me if
I’d like to come and share a riff,
of course I will not turn him down.
In spite of all my new renown,
I’ll take the time to show him some
new ways I’ve found to pick and strum.

Mick Jagger would hang out with me
(and Leo Kottke, probably.)
We’d get together to talk and jam.
The whole world would know who I am!
My fame would spread to presidents
and queens and Knob Hill residents.
I’d be so busy that I fear
my writing would fall in arrears.
I might forget to feed my dog,
forsake my friends, neglect my blog.

So all things taken to account,
as negatives begin to mount,
and though I know that I’d go far
should I decide to play guitar,
I’ve penned a note unto myself,
“Put that guitar back on the shelf!!!”

The Prompt (from July 3, 2014): Strike a Chord—Do you play an instrument? Is there a musical instrument whose sound you find particularly pleasing? Tell us a story about your experience or relationship with an instrument of your choice.