Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

Blown

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Blown

It whistles a soft melody, this whisper of the wind.
Sings a mysterious lullaby, seemingly without end.
We do not know its language, but know it well by Braille.
It makes a tangle of our hair and swells our vessel’s sail.
It blows into a tempest that hurls us off our course.
Where it once took us willingly, it takes us now by force.
It is that infinite mystery whose answer is unknown
until someday, perhaps, when we arrive at where we’re blown.

The prompts for today are: unknown whisper infinite  lullaby
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/29/fowc-with-fandango-unknown/
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/rdp59-whisper/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/daily-addictions-2018-week-30/(infinite)
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/lullaby/

 

Time Out!

6 Replies

 

Time Out!

He was an avid sports fan. Alas, his wife was not.
With box scores and with averages, his mind was fully fraught.
Tennis, football, cricket? It mattered not a whit.
If a ball was fought over, he had to witness it.
Basketball and baseball and soccer were the same
as golf to him. Whatever. For all sport he was game.
At last, his wife had had enough and did what she was able
to cure his wild obsession. She cut the TV cable.

The TV went as black as night. The sports fan sat in shock.
He did not move a muscle. He did not blink or talk.
Then he began to jerk and shake as though having a fit.
Withdrawal from his sports fix seemed the cause of it.
As his delirium tremens overtook his life,
 things were getting better for his kids and wife.
His wife could watch her soap operas, the kids watched their cartoons.
No longer did a sports announcer fill their afternoons.

This furtive arrangement lasted for awhile
until our ballgame junkie figured out their guile.
He moved into a condo to catch up on his sport
and his wife remarried to another sort
who did not know a baseball from a hockey puck.
That such a man existed, she could not believe her luck!
The blessed quiet of her house with no announcer shouting
made her glad she turned her spouse’s inning to an outing!

The Prompts:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/27/fowc-with-fandango-arrangement/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/avid-july-27-2018/

Reflections

9 Replies

 

I think I was 12 or 13 when this was taken, playing dress-up in my older sister’s dress!


Reflections

I do not seek out mirrors, for I don’t like what I see.
That pudgy older woman barely resembles me.
I prefer reflection of the memory kind,
rooting around within my brain to see what I can find.

Old lovers all hang out there, frozen as they were,
and when I break into their worlds, I create quite a stir,
for I am as I was as well, less inches ’round my waist,
my hair much longer and my skirt length much more to their taste.

I’m thinking just how fortunate it is that we should meet,
both of us together on this familiar street.
What are the chances we’d be here at the selfsame time––
drawn in from our different lives to join here in this rhyme?

Then of course I realize it is by my orchestration
rather than a miracle of synchronization.
At first, our talk is  shallow, our conversation bland.
What causes  a big flurry is when he takes my hand.

It’s then that I remember what it is I miss.
It’s not the conversation, but rather it’s that kiss
that sent my senses spinning off to some future land
where I imagined he would ask my father for my hand.

But when that event came for real, that time for plans and rings,
I found my mind was turning to many other things.
College and then travel to many foreign strands—
things that wouldn’t happen if we wore wedding bands.

So we parted directions—off to different lives,
adventures with different spouses, children with different wives.
Building separate futures that led us both to this:
to fifty years thereafter and that same remembered kiss!

Written for these three prompts:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/rdp-54-reflection/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/07/25/fortunate-july-25-2018/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/25/fowc-with-fandango-shallow/

 

Books (For Daily Addictions July 21, 2018 prompt of Obsolete)

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Books

The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
its paper sprinkled with drops-—
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory—
that rainstorm run through,
how he put it in his back pocket.

Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.

Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages—
finger food served with brain food.
Passions wrapped in paper and ink—
the allure of a book and the tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.

Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial—
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us.

What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Wikipedia replacing dictionaries,
Google already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?

Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs.
Perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
Perhaps the grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them—as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages—one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.

search
search-1Yes, you are right.  These are chairs made out of books.

In response to The Daily Addictions prompt of obsolete  Of all the technologies that have gone extinct in your lifetime, which one do you miss the most?

The Daily Addictions prompt is obsolete.

A Vindication of Single Life

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A Vindication of Single Life

I will not love for comfort. I will not love for gold.
I will not love for custom nor approval of the fold.
The handsomest of profiles will not win my hand.
Fair face alone will not insure I’ll wear a wedding band.

Those whom others seek to wed are not my man of choice.
I want a man gentle of heart but bold of word and voice.
One with an eye for beauty written in other places
aside from what the world demands in figure and in faces.

That certain novel contour molded by his hand.
A forearm strongly muscled. Sinewy and tanned.
Serious in nature, but not too melancholy.
Capable of fine reasoning, but also fun and jolly.

A man who carries others securely in his heart.
A man I am a part of even when we are apart.
An oddball twist of humor. A unique bend of mind.
Someone glib in rejoinder, but also fair and kind.

I am by no means perfect in demeanor nor in form.
My face is not the fairest and my habits aren’t the norm.
I am not the world’s best dancer nor a very sexy dame,
but  I bet someone exists whose imperfections are the same!


Written for these two prompts.  Check out their URLS and come play along:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/rdp-50-gold/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/20/fowc-with-fandango-melancholy/

In the Blood

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Image downloaded from Internet.

Remember Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil, the lion lured out of a game park in Tanzania  in 2015?  This is a poem I wrote and dedicated to him at the time. I was wondering how he is doing now and if he ever had the nerve to mount Cecil’s head in his trophy room, so checked up on him again via the link above.  I dedicate this poem again to him and to all who profit from the spilling of blood in sport, be it war games or other blood sport.

In the Blood!!!
(Dedicated to Walter Palmer)

Don’t you just love football—the running and the tackling?
The sounds of hamstrings pulling and the crunch of femurs crackling?
We sit up in the bleachers eating hot dogs, drinking beer,
comfortably viewing blood sport—the kind we hold so dear.

Aren’t dogfights lovely–the growling and the whining?
Too bad they aren’t more elite, so we could watch while dining.
So amusing watching canines being dished their due.
Dying is so entertaining when it isn’t you!

Better still are bullfights, though they’re few and far between.
The bull so lithe and dangerous, the matador so lean.
The best part of the sport is that the dying is so slow.
I feel its thrill suffuse me from my head down to my toe.

We adore big game hunting in such exotic lands–
our chance to prove our manliness with our own two hands–
handing over money to those trackers in the know
who guarantee an easy kill with rifle or with bow.

Easy on the hunter, but not the animal,
for just because he’s hit the prey’s not guaranteed to fall.
We get more for our money if he’s hard to track,
and war games are more pleasant when one’s foe doesn’t shoot back!

All these minor titillations just a prelude to
the main event and the most major way of counting coup.
Once all the good old boys are finding life is just a bore,
they round up all the younger men and send them off to war.

See how the valiant struggle, see their stripes and purple hearts–
apt pay for missing arms and legs and other blown off parts.
Lucky to be home at last and lucky to be living–
the products of that blood sport that just somehow keeps on giving.

The Daily Addictions prompt for today is dedicate.

Away

1 Reply

Away

I write through early morning, long before the day
intrudes upon the shadows, intent to have its say.

Words birthed in the nighttime never seem to quit.
They come like half-tamed horses, chomping at the bit.

They seem to have a power and meaning all their own,
where they complete their foaling before the seeds are sown.

Truth is there behind us before it ever shows—
like words before they’re spoken, and wind before it blows.

Before the morning opens, memories fully lit
are brought to life in wondrous tales, straining at the bit.

Brought swiftly to these different worlds to live a life apart—
far from the one who made them, like a horse without its cart.

I like to set my words free to canter on their own,
to feed upon the prairie grass that grows where it has blown.

The Ragtag Prompt was open.

Fandango’s prompt was memory.

In the Open

9 Replies

In the Open

The day is balmy
with segmented clouds.
The African tulip tree
spreads its boughs wide
over the seated ones
as well as the one who stands in front of us,
leading us to ground our feet,
relax our arms with hands palms up
and to go inside ourselves
to watch our breath
and be in the now,
in the state that she calls openness.

To be in the future is not openness, she says,
and to be in the past is not openness.
Only the now is really living.
And it occurs to me
that when I think I want a cup of coffee
and leave my studio to go in search of it,
then, in the kitchen,
can’t remember what I’m there for,
(and the reason why so many
friends my age are doing the same)
is because we are in this state of openness
more frequently
as we get older.
Wanting a cup of coffee is in the future,
and remembering we wanted a cup of coffee
a few minutes ago
is having to remember the past.

Standing here in the kitchen
listening to the baby birds’
loud cheeps
from their nest in the kitchen overhang
is being in the now.
And so it is that all of us, as we age,
are in the deepest stages of meditation
most of the time
and should not worry so much
about Alzheimer’s or dementia,
because we are where Tibetan monks
and ladies leading meditiation
would have us be.

Open. Living the now
with increasingly
less memory
for what was
or was to be.

 

The Ragtag prompt today is open.

Knees

14 Replies

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Knees

Knees, knees, folks have knees
from Katmandu down to Belize.
In Peru, where they ride llamas
they still have knees in their pajamas.
Further north, up where it freezes,
even Polar bears have kneezes.

Knees, knees, folks have knees
to ogle, fondle, pet and squeeze.
(It’s easy when they’re under kilts.)
Some knees on roller skates or stilts
are scabbed and scaly, skinned and sore
but still they know what they are for.

Knees are great to bounce a baby,
to kick a soccer ball, or maybe
to bend in prayer when they’re in church,
or form a perfect sort of perch
for swains who fall on bended knee
to say, ‘I’d like to marry thee.’

Knees, knees, folks have knees.
In sun they burn, in snow they freeze.
Yet  knees can cross and knees can knock.
Knees can jog you round the block.
Knees are handy and dependable.
And aren’t we glad that knees are bendable?

 

The Daily Addictions prompt today is convenient.  I ask you.  What is more convenient than knees?

Blind Date

24 Replies

 

Blind Date

With an air of abandon, she threw off her clothes,
rolled up her hair and night creamed her nose.
She was sure she’d see no one ’til morning at work,
so she removed her bridge with a tug and a jerk.
She peeled off her eyelashes, creamed off her blush.
Did all  this slowly with no need to rush.
A natural girl now, her face put away
for her to reclaim the very next day.

She’s snugged up in flannel, propped up in her bed.
By the end of this evening, her book will be read.
The large bowl of chili that rests on the table
right by the bed, she’ll devour when she’s able.
In between page turns, she’ll take a big bite.
She’ll feast and she’ll read ’til she puts out the light.

Until the night’s silence is shattered by ringing.
The strum of guitars and some romantic singing
completes all the ruckus occurring outside
as she pulls up the covers to cower and hide.
For she has remembered, alas and too late
that this was the night that she had a blind date.
She springs to the bathroom to try to redo
all that she’s lately hastened to undo.

“Just a minute!” she calls, and she hears his reply.
Her beauty procedures are done on the fly.
She rips out her curlers, unwinding, unfurling
the locks she’d just put there for overnight curling.
The mascara wand flies. Rouge is rapidly swiped
across the same cheeks she has recently wiped.
She throws on her clothes, grabs her phone and her purse.
No more time to prepare, and no time to rehearse.

She opens the door to survey her date.
He has a nice face and a shiny bald pate.
She consults her watch and she scolds, “You are late!”
Her side of the tale, she’ll neglect to relate.
They’ll have a fine evening and he will take care
not to mention the curler in back of her hair.
Some things best unspoken are things her date knows—
like her one missing eyebrow and cream on her nose.
These slight imperfections he took in his stride
Which is why one year later she wound up his bride.

.

The Daily Addictions prompt is abandon.