Category Archives: Poetry

Clarity: Words After an Armistice

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This relationship sounds like it is “almost” over, but there is always hope—more hope if he heeds her advice.
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/06/20/fowc-with-fandango-almost/

lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

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Words After an Armistice

I want to make this perfectly clear.
We are not close just because we are near.
There has to be more than proximity for
my heart to open its almost closed door.

Say something sweet to me. Say something rare.
I do not feel loved just because you are there
across a room that is filled up with things.
You must think of something and give your thoughts wings.

Speak playful words that will prompt words from me.
Then volley them back to me. Don’t let thoughts “be”
without giving them air to live in and grow
so they banish these shadows and fan fire’s glow.

Passion’s not something for us to remember.
It’s better a constantly glowing live ember.
Get up from your chair.  Give that remote a miss
and speak to me now with a word or a kiss.

Remove my hands from the keyboard and say,

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Tin Soldier

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Tin Soldier

Petulant child, in a bit of a snit,
pooches his lips out. He’s having a fit.
He sets up tin soldiers in orderly rows.
Where they will be fighting, not even he knows.

Fast through the air, his tweets swiftly whistle,
delivering threats like an ICBM missile.
He casts insults northwards and south over borders
to Mexico, Canada and other quarters.

He’s saving his friendships for other bad boys.
With each fawning message his keyboard deploys,
he wishes their power were his for the taking.
Korea and Russia—what plots in the making.

His attention span just long enough for his tweeting,
he blusters his way through each conference and meeting.
Many are gap-jawed, yet nothing gets done
concerning disarming this smoking gun.

He’s expressing his own sort of odd concentration
by impounding children, expressing elation
that this will now curb illegal immigration.
How long will we let this man screw up our nation?

Daily Addiction’s prompt today is Gasp!  What better to cause us to gasp in the news today than our self-serving president’s recent horrendous action?

Update: okcforgottenman commented and added this video, which feels appropriate to this post.

If you want to hear testimony of those who have witnessed this separation process and to hear the voices and reactions of children as they are being taken from their parents at the border, then to be taken through a process by which you can easily reach congresspeople who can do something about it, go HERE.

Falling Water

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This is one of three waterfalls that spill down the mountain behind my house during the rainy season.

Falling Water

You, my wild and rushing daughter
remind me of falling water
spilling  from one place to another
while your sister and your brother
are calm ponds—docile and still.
Do you think you ever will
come to rest within our glade
or will you continue to cascade
from mountainside to jungle floor,
always rushing out the door
to adventures in a farflung world?
Another part of you unfurled
in some new place and some new time,
a foreign place you find sublime.
We’ve had one life. You’ve had a few.
Why, love, will one world not do?

 

For the Rag Tag Daily Prompt, the word of the day was cataract.

Although I don’t have a brother and my family did move around a bit (but not as much as I have,) this poem was based a bit on the only letter my father ever wrote to me. I had been traveling and working abroad for a few years by then, first in Australia, then in Singapore and Africa. I’ve remembered one of sections: “The wild geese have rested on the pond for the night. They remind me of you, my wild fledgling, winging your way across the world with no place to call your own.” Those words, so poetic, show a side of my father I wish he had brought out more frequently on paper, so here I’ve done it for him.

Scuttle Rebuttal

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Scuttle Rebuttal

We scuttle between life’s different stages
like hamsters on wheels or rats running mazes.
In childhood, we cannot wait to grow up.
We wear our pants low and mutter, “Whuzzup?”
We think when we’re teenagers, we’ll really live
as childhood passes like sand through a sieve.
As teens, all our reckoning’s fixed on afar–—
that day when we’ll finally drive our dad’s car!
Then university becomes our goal,
or life in the factory or life on the dole
if school seems a prison and we want to skip
one of the stages so we can just zip
to earning a dollar and running our lives,
buzzing right through it like bees in their hives.
Milling and rushing—careening through life.
Barely a girlfriend before we’re a wife.
Driving kids one two three from this lesson to that
until we can’t reflect where exactly we’re at.
Grandpas and grandmas, then single once more.
Losing a spouse may just open a door
to a last  phase and the end of this rhyme.
A phase where, finally, we’ll take the time
to just sit and enjoy the stage that we’re in,
now that we’re retired and resting’s no sin.
Invest in a porch swing, a hammock or cat
that gives you a reason to be where you’re at
without moving or thinking of something to do.
Just sit yourself down. Scratch the cat. Eye the view.
Life’s more than a puzzle and more than a queue.
Take time to enjoy this life that you grew!!!

 

The Daily Addictions prompt today is scuttle.

Our Own Little Universes: Pains, Rips, Stars, Itineraries and Insights

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Somehow, a posting on intuition got posted on the Ragtag prompt for “Insight,” so I must reclaim my honor by reblogging this actual post on Insights from four years ago.

Insight. The Ragtag Post prompt #2 was insight.

lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

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Our Own Little Universes: Pains, Rips, Stars, Itineraries and Insights

Yolanda and Pasiano must have thought I was crazy when I started packing a week ago for my 2 month trip to the beach. First, all of my clothes piled on the bed in the spare room, then art and jewelry-making supplies piled on one end of the other bed, computer and photography needs piled on the other end. Bags full of other art supplies. Then two days ago, little piles of spices and kitchen tools, canned goods, disinfectant for fruit and veggies, bags of papers I’ve been wanting to sort for 13 years. (There will be time at the beach, where I know no one.)

But now it was the night before and with the car mostly packed with suitcase and bags, I still had hours more of sorting and packing to do. I knew it would probably…

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Failed Honeymoon

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Failed Honeymoon

Alas, the groom’s romanticism
failed to thrive on criticism
that paired with much pedanticism,
soon led to a marital schism.
Oh, that the bride had been less callous
in revealing all her malice.
If she had been less vitriolic
and more open to honeymoon frolic,
he might have been less alcoholic.

 

The Daily Addictions prompt word today is vitriolic.

The Little Potus goes “Tweet, Tweet, Tweet”

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When My Baby Walks down the Street,
I Bet the Little Potus goes “Tweet, Tweet. Tweet”

Alas, it seems our head of state
so schooled in the realms of hate,
lacks the wisdom to placate
by offering to abdicate.

No matter that so many hate
this fool behind the White House gate,
he just simply doesn’t get it
and is too dimwit to regret it.

He just blunders through his life
seducing one more colleague’s wife.
He lays on hands wherever they
deign to wander, deign to stray

(up every nearby skirted ass.)
But one, at least, he gave a pass.
He must have reigned it in ( I hope)
when he visited the Pope.

Much as his tweets excoriate
all of his enemies of state,
if he were smarter, he would see
He is his own worst enemy.

 

Fandango’s prompt for the day is placate.

First Kiss

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First Kiss

“Allemande left, allemande right.
Promenade your lady, hold her tight!”
Years later, I recall demands
for touching waists and holding hands.
To “Promenade. Go ’round the world.”
We do-si-doed and faced and whirled.
Square-dancing was called to blame
the day I first encountered shame.

Just six years old and mild and meek,
a boy my age dared peck my cheek.
His mother pulled him off the floor,
then jerked him rudely out the door,
shaming him with words and action
before I knew my own reaction,
which might have merely been a measure
of a friendly mutual pleasure.

Instead, for twelve more years together,
held as classmates in close tether,
much as I perhaps desired
that we might have again conspired,
he never tried what once was censured.
Another kiss was never ventured

’til in our twenties, home from college,
emboldened by our further knowledge,
home briefly for summer vacation,
heartened by a small libation,
finding ourselves in darkened car
up on a hill, his mother far
away in town, we finally kissed,
discovering what we had missed.

Then we went our separate ways—
that one night just a summer’s phase.
Years later, though, I still recall.
that first kiss, and his mother’s gall
over what was a gentle theft
prompted by an “Allemande left.”


The “guilty parties” are, it is true, pictured above, but I’m not one to kiss and tell. This true memory was prompted by today’s “Daily Addiction” prompt of promenade.

Skinny-Dipping

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Important note: This is a shape poem , but if you look at it in Reader, it distorts the shape by left margin justifying.  Please click on the title again and you will view it from my blog where it will be centered and you can see the shape.

Skinny-Dipping 

There’s a change in the weather, a shift in the light.
The palm trees are swaying. Three stars shining bright.
The water is cooling, my exercise through.
Clouds cover the moon. I think it’s my cue
to get out of the water before I turn blue,
then clouds shift and the moon turns its usual hue.

The wind stirs the water. I think of past times
ages ago in different climes.
All those past lives, can they really be mine?
If I put experience in a straight line,
could I see the reason for things as they were
as my life sped by–—a perpetual whirr?

What gave me the courage to do what I did
since that time long ago when I was a kid
and took that first journey out on my own,
out of the house across grass newly mown,
fresh from the bathtub, laughing with glee,
nude for the whole world to look out and see.

Running down the sidewalk until I was captured
again by my mother, winded but enraptured
by this one-year-old daughter escaped from her bath,
already set out on her singular path.
So many roadways traveled since then.
So many different lives that have been

tried and discarded in favor of others.
Surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers,
surrogate sisters and friends freshly minted,
plane tickets ordered, paid for and printed.
Travel adventures. Dangers to survive.
Making it through it all still alive.

I come up     from the pool,
dripping and     shivering.
Those few    bold stars
above me    delivering
promises     that I
might still   be a rover.
While there   is breath left,
my life       isn’t over.

 

For V.J.’s Weekly Challenge prompt, shift:  “Alter your routine in some small way this week.
The idea is not to do something that over taxes your already busy schedule – just something that shifts you enough to make a difference. Or maybe, it won’t. Your response can be in the form of prose, poetry, photograph(s) or whatever moves you.”

The “shift” I did was to go out to the pool and swim and exercise for an hour before writing to her prompt word. The poem above is what resulted.

Generosity

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Wikimedia image 

Generosity

Too often generosity
must suffer the pomposity
of that rich soul who grants it to
recompense those lucky few
for all he gouged throughout his life—
blind to their needs and lives of strife.

The library that bears his name
should also bear the stain of shame.
His reputation  for charity
indeed, had been a rarity
for all the years he cheated workers,
calling them deadbeats or shirkers.

When they asked for a living wage,
their pleas were met by silent rage,
beatings, dockings, firings, 
lock-outs and rehirings
of other hungry men who stayed
for meager wages that he paid.

The dedications will proclaim
his noble acts and spread his fame,
but the world will not take note,
nor will the history books quote
how his empire was slowly carved
out of those masses who slowly starved

The Daily Addictions prompt today was generosity.