Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

Jam and Toast for Dinner

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  Wishful thinking.

Jam and Toast for Dinner

She could not stand to touch a worm,
for squiggly things just made her squirm,
and so she cast a naked hook
into the waters of the brook.
You might have guessed she was not able
to provide protein for our table,
thus proving that old axiom
forgotten by our squeamish mom.
“When you go out fishing, best do it by the book.
No one ever caught a fish with an unbaited hook.”

For the dVerse Poets prompt: aphorisms.

I believe this is a new aphorism to add to your list!

Forced Celebration

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Forced Celebration

As they frogmarched their prisoner into the room,
uncountable candles dispelled the gloom.
A pervading odor of sugar and wax
was entrenched in the air around piles and stacks
of brightly wrapped boxes of variable sizes,
yet she was not swayed by potential surprises.
Soothing smiles of friends and the song they were singing
were tangential to thoughts that were wildly zinging
through her mind, for in short, she did not find it nifty
that this was the day that she would turn fifty!!!

Prompts today are frogmarch, variable, soothing, entrench, pervading, candle and tangential. Image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.

Imitating Grandma

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Imitating Grandma

In my grandma’s pleasant house,
dressed up in her peasant blouse,
a towel stuffed in to form a lump
to imitate her dorsal hump,
I tried to imitate her waddle
and her propensity to dawdle,
offering morsels from her cookie jar,
as she watched me from afar.

With not a filament of shame,
I went about my childish game,
beaming as I played the gimp,
miming her arthritic  limp.
In my innocent portrayal
was the cruelest betrayal.
The family knew the shame was mine,
but as I toddled down the line

of people who filled up the room,
I gloried to the cheerful boom
of Grandma’s laugh as she piped up
to save this youngest clueless pup
from the shame I might have felt
if she had not approached and knelt
down next to me, gathering in
this cruel mime, absolving sin.

And though I thought the final line
would surely be a quip of mine,
aping her halting foreign speech
as I tried to avoid her reach,
she gathered me in loving hug
and giving an indulgent shrug,
said, “Forgive her, for she’s only three
and gets her sense of humor from me!”

 

Prompts today are dawdle, (love that word) mine, peasant, filament, morsel, beaming and portrayal. Image from the internet.

Yolanda for the dVerse Poet’s Pub

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Yolanda

She plucks the dirty clothes
like field flowers from the basket,
her journey to the laundry
another joyful excursion 
from room to room in my house.
Did she enjoy her vacation? I ask.
She shakes her head no.
She’d rather be working,
she insists.

Every task,
fulfilled to perfection,
builds her pleasure in the day.
She dusts the picture frames,
folds the towels,
steals her dusting cloth back from the playful puppy,
then takes the dish sponge from my hand.
Let her, she says,
and you go write a poem!

Y, en espanol. Gracias, Lisa.  oxoxox

Yolanda

Ella arranca la ropa sucia
como flores de campo de la canasta,
su viaje a la lavandería
otra excursión
alegre de habitación en habitación en mi casa.
¿Disfrutó de sus vacaciones? Pregunto.
Ella sacude la cabeza no.
Ella preferiría estar trabajando,
ella insiste.

Cada tarea,
cumplido a la perfección,
construye su placer en el día.
Ella desempolva los marcos de los cuadros,
dobla las toallas,
roba su tela de polvo del cachorro juguetón,
 luego toma la esponja del plato de mi mano.
Déjala, dice,
 ¡y vas a escribir un poema!

A double quadrille for the dVerse Poets Pub, the task set by Lisa is to compose a quadrille on the topic of work. To see the prompt itself and the wonderful poems it quotes to name the task, go HERE. And to read poems that answer the prompt, go HERE.

Something Fishy

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Something Fishy

Those who embrace fish cuisine need to heed my warning,
for even though a new catch comes in every single morning,
our local seafood retailer it’s rumored is a mobster
who concocts a fishy mishmash and pawns it off as lobster.
It’s mushier than lobster and they say a wee bit pallid,
so if you want the real deal, better stick with tuna salad.

Prompt words today are lobster, embrace, concoct, retailer, tuna salad.

So Long, Marianne! (Tribute to Leonard Cohen)

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         So Long, Marianne!

Mmmmm, he said, I think I need
Another kiss and then, indeed,
Require a hug to go with it.
I like the way that our lips fit.
And if you choose to give me none,
Neither will I give you one!
No love is won by those found lacking
Expertise in hugs and smacking.

                                                                                                 –Judy Dykstra-Brown

 

Murisopsis’s Scavenger Hunt Prompt at Looking at Names is to write an acrostic poem for Marianne.

Sea Shanty

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Sea Shanty

We dined upon quahaug clams, oysters and shrimp,
but the sauce tasted funny, the lettuce was limp,
and an onerous numbness in our lips and our legs
immediately suggested we’d been served the dregs
of a past morning’s catch, so we rued our selection
and sought out a mole to back up our detection
of who had slipped up and served us bad shellfish.
What entrepreneur was so greedy and selfish

that he’d risk our lives simply for filthy lucre?
We appealed to the waiters to provide some succor
and spurred on by our pleas and sizable tips,
they gave us proof that our angry sore lips
were the product of clams a few days past their prime,
so we sued that rude restauranteur for his crime.

He was found guilty and is now in the cooler
where if he’d been smarter and a little less crueler,
our clams would have been in the days before serving.
And we all agree no convict’s more deserving 
of a stay in the hoosegow, and because of our plight,
when we’re in a mood to go out for a bite,
we skip all the seafood joints, pass them right by
and go out for a burger or a nice meat pie.

 

prompt words are slip, selection, mole, dregs, quahaug, immediately and onerous. Image by Louis Hansel on Unsplash.

New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

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New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

To *neotorize a new word when you can’t find a rhyme
is not really playing fair, in fact it is a crime.
Surely any writer who is worth her salt
is expected to have words enough stored in her mental vault

so no errant *wyvern can abscond with them,
and fly them off to some tall tree, where, perched upon a limb,
he’ll breath fire, thus reducing all the words to ash,
dispensing all their fragments with a tremendous lash

of tail as he flies off again in a hunt bicoastal,
for words shared by any means: books, magazines or postal.
No honeyed tongue can save them once charred and ground to dust,
but still all words that they contained should be recalled and must

once more be written down so those words purloined and embered
by the next generation can be read and thus remembered.
No need to coin new words to express those thoughts once thought.
Better to recall the ones poets of old have wrought.

Hard enough to put them in the rows they once assumed.
Half the work is over once the old words are exhumed.
Why go to twice the work when half the work will do?
And best that once restored, you hide them from the wyvern’s view!!!!

 

*to neotorize is to coin new words, terms or expressions.
*a wyvern is a legendary creature with a dragon’s head and wings, a reptilian body.

Prompt words today are ash, abscond, expect, *neotorize, honey, *wyvern and  coastal

Shelled Sanctity

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Shelled Sanctity

This retreat for turtles in the mountains of Nepal
has the godliest turtles on our Earthly spinning ball.

See the holiest of holies in their tiny saffron robes,
doing daily meditations by pushing tiny globes

first eastward and then westward with a pointed beak,
defining piety by actions instead of how they speak.

See lurking in the shadows, a million tiny ants,
bending low to watch their passing, those tiny sycophants—

who profess to kiss the ground that the turtles walk upon,
but instead just make use of the paths they’ve made when they are gone.

Busy small collectors, they build layer upon layer
of food to nourish bodies, but murmur not a prayer

in thanks for what they’re given, for they know right well
proper thanks is being given by the Brothers of the Shell.

 

Prompts today are lurking, define, saffron, satirical, godliest, turtles and sycophant.

Rudely Interrupted

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Rudely Interrupted

Notwithstanding what the newspapers say, I am not capricious.
I merely have a questioning eye that’s oftentimes suspicious.

I found the blade and saw the blood and what I had surveyed
I felt was information that must be conveyed.

It’s true the entire police force was at once deployed
and also true the mayor was excessively annoyed 

that it was his summer barbecue  that was rudely stormed.
by the selfsame vice squad that he had lately formed.

Only to have them tell him when he did his yearly preps
for his fabled pig roast on his own front steps,

he should remove the grisly evidence lest neighbors be alarmed
that it might have been a human being that was harmed.

The mayor, truly irked at the action he’d incited,
resumed his annual picnic and I was not invited!!!

 

Prompts today are capricious, blade, survey, deploy, questioner, newspaper and notwithstanding. If you want to play along, the links to the prompt sites are under the prompt words. Image by Hassan Rafhaan on Unsplash.