Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

Pied Beauty II

 

 

Today’s prompt being “spoof,” I decided to resurrect this parody of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty,” one of my first blogs ever back in 2014:

Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

 

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The Ragtag prompt is spoof.

Some Cursory Comments

Some Cursory Comments

My cursory comments I doubt will draw raves,
garner no compliments, create no waves.
Words cast to the wee hours have little wit.
It would be no loss if they never were writ.
And yet they keep coming, first one, then the next.
Doubtless their readers will be sorely vexed
to see that these lines here are nothing but fluff.
Cursory comments are rarely enough!!!

For Fandango’s Cursory prompt.

Blind Potential

Blind Potential

This trail of salt reveals to me you’re led by superstition.
Eyes shut tight, you stumble on, following tradition.
Like a deer in headlights, you are blinded by the light
that others cast, refusing to be guided by insight.

There is a light inside you that will lead you much more surely.
That little nudge that prompts you will guide you more securely.
Trust that spark within you to tell you what to do.
You need not fear those  instincts you carry within you.

They are the wisdom of the universe, trying to get out.
If you do not heed their whisper, you may later hear their shout.
What you deem as accidents might be communication
from that inner part of you, prompting your education.

Although those outer voices may continue to deride,
trust your inner voices. They are firmly on your side.
What you find within you may be genius that’s unknown
that won’t come to fruition until it has been sown.

You are its only guardian. Only you can plant and tend
and bring these new world miracles to their fruitful end.
Do not let superstition or fear of the what could be
keep you from that within you that is your destiny.

 

The Ragtag prompt is superstition.
Fandango’s promt is fear.

I Just Can’t See Infinity

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I Just Can’t See Infinity

If my life was infinite,
no doubt I’d make a mess of it.
It’s hard enough to get it right—
to be law-abiding and polite—
for eighty or one hundred years.
We need time off for shifting gears.
Tyrants must get tired of
ruling the world with fisted glove,
and perfect folks must need deflection
from their lives of stark perfection.
Reincarnation is just right
for exchanging one life’s plight
for another set of woes.
For trying out some different clothes!
For giving us another chance
to trade in Omaha for France!!!
Let us be mortal. Let it be.
We do not need infinity!!!

The Daily Addictions prompt is infinite.

Spinning Top

 

Spinning Top

Is senility a resurrected prenatal state—
hearing the outer world
with limited stages of connection?
Or is it a journey backwards through a lifetime,
remembering details pushed into
the closets of the mind by daily tasks?

The hum of a life is deafening in this world.
Even with earbuds or headsets,
the noise of the world streams in,
wired direct into our consciousness,
quelling thoughts of our own,
wiping clean for the time being,
memories.

The whole world with us every minute
leads to no world of our own.
Barraged our entire lives,
more now than ever,
does senility offer a time before our death
to connect with our inner selves once more?

Relieved of the world,
do we spin like a top into that inner world,
remembering a lifetime lost to activity—
the resurrected adolescence of old age 
evolving backwards into a dreaming time
wherein we joyfully wander ourselves again?

Some choose the rope, fearing a nightmare of senility,
yet some of us hope for a return to dreams of childhood,
relieved of all care, even for ourselves.
No one comes back to tell us which it is,
yet some of us?
 We hope.
We hope.

 

For RDP the prompt was Resurrection.

Volatile

 

 

Volatile

As reliable as fireworks on the 4th of July,
you ignite. Over what? Who could guess?
We shield ourselves as if from floating embers,
ward off the sting for others and ourselves.
You bright shooting stars leave your aftereffects.
We, below, contend with them, 
and never fail to show up for your next grand display.

 

FOWC’s prompt is fireworks.
The Daily Addiction prompt is reliable.

Flip Flop (for DVerse Poets Pub)


flip flop

the sound  of ease
and summer

not much to slip into
or out of

sand between toes
and other cracks

released in sleep
to gritty sheets

grinding our sleep
and clogging up washing machines

long gone the days of high button shoes
and the shoe horns that went with them.

Waist cinchers
give way to bikinis

and bikinis
to nude beaches

half of the world
flip flopping

rubber soles
and swinging breasts.

flip flops
taking the place

of gasps
as stays are tightened

the other half
burqas and Jimmy Choo

these differences
in freedom found

and freedom
found too slowly

find release in
collapsing towers

conceal, reveal.
flip flop.

 

For dVerse Poets Pub–on summer.

Black Hole

R=(2GM)/(c^2)

As we’ve evolved from scales to skin,
growing the body we’re now in,
Did our mind grow here inside?
How did our soul come to abide
secure within this human form?
How did it come to be the norm?
Did words form here in you and me
simply because they yearned to be?
Were they put here to link us to
that in the eternal stew
that unites us all, in our unknowing
to a universal glowing?
And if so, what an irony
as words transform and set us free,
they also split us wide apart––
placing the head before the heart.
Substituting a dollar sign
for solutions that should be divine.
Can this be our ultimate goal,
in our journey toward our own black hole?
To grow our mind and freeze our heart
until it blows us all apart?
As science seeks to understand,
it holds us all within its hand.
It has the means, if it should please,
to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
I wonder, then, can even a soul
escape the pull of a black hole?

The RDP prompt today is scale.
The Daily Addictions prompt was transform.

Word Pie

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Word Pie

I take them as a milestone, these long afternoon naps
that make my late nights possible by filling in the gaps
between compulsive writing sessions to meet the assignment
of all these daily prompt words coming to us by consignment!

Blogging’s become a nightmare that’s turned me slightly manic.
Prompts have me fully frustrated and in a mid-life panic.
(To be truthful, only “midlife” if one forty is my lifespan,
which, if I had my druthers, really would become my lifeplan!)

Prompts now come like a waterfall that’s turned on every morning.
I might have just ignored them if I’d only had a warning
that I’d become obsessive in using one and all.
(I have them in my bookmarks and must daily heed their call.)

That WordPress prompt now seems like poverty. One short month ago
we only had one daily prompt site where all of us would go.
Every day, we waited for it like the early morning sun,
but now we face a heat wave for there isn’t only one.

Ragtag and Fandango have become Daily Addictions—
not to mention other Word Prompts that demand our daily fictions.
Cee’s Share Your World still tempts us, as does that dVerse Poet.
We could have stuck to only them. Alas, we did not know it!

Now we are all scrambling to fill  all their demands.
It keeps our poor brains busy, not to mention how our hands
cramp up from all this typing as our lives all go awry
as we all line up to get each daily slice of prompt site pie!

This poem is an attempt to meet all of the below prompts..Ooops, sorry “Heatwave,” I slipped a photo prompt in without realizing it.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/rdp-29-milestone/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/poverty/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/06/29/fowc-with-fandango-nightmare/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/27/word-prompt-frustrating/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/23/photo-challenge-heat-wave

https://ceenphotography.com/2018/06/25/share-your-world-june-25-2018/

 

https://weeklyprompts.com/prompts/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/27/word-prompt-frustrating/

Regeneration

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Regeneration

Hobbling around on the stump of a life,
nobody’s lover and nobody’s wife,
her children and grandchildren all raised and grown,
out of her life and out on their own.

Is her life over? Is it near its ending,
or has she another life that is just pending?
Has she a talent for regeneration?
Is the first sixty years mere education?

A single shoe dropped is only one shoe.
Life isn’t over until it is through.
Perhaps she’s less active removed from the past,
but wind can still fill out a sail at half mast.

The stub of a life can still get us around.
A heart can still beat and the blood can still pound.
Go after adventure for all you are worth,
for every new day is a part of your birth.

The Daily Addictions prompt is generate.