Category Archives: Poetry

Poems in many categories: Loss, NaPoWriMo

Rhythm Method

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(The poem I’ve written below is based on the “Five Principles for Getting through the Trump Years,” given by Alice Walker in her speech at a reading in La Manzanilla, Mexico two nights ago on February 20, 2017. I was fortunate enough to be at that reading where she and four other excellent writers also talked about subjugation, prejudice, inequality, poverty and the importance of kindness, open-mindedness, acceptance and education in bringing our country to a better level of fairness to all.  I’ll talk about some of the other poets and storytellers who told their tales in a later post; but for today, and since it fit in with today’s prompt, here is my take on Ms. Walker’s wonderful talk.)

Rhythm Method

You’ve got to listen to the beat.
Shake your booty, pound your feet.
If you want to survive the day,
the rhythm method is the way.
It’s been said by smarter folks than I
that it’s the way that we’ll get by
in times we think we won’t survive—
the way we stay fully alive
in spite of voters who were hazy
and voted in a man who’s crazy.

Instead of listening to his bleat,
until the time of his defeat,
first and foremost, kindness will
help us to swallow this bitter pill.
A close connection with nature might
help us stay strong in the fight.
Respect for all those elders who
just might be another hue:

native tribes or Africans
brought unwillingly as hands
to shore up our economy
and build a country for you and me
while they paid the awful fee
in poverty and slavery.
It’s time to set our people free!

Gratitude for human life,
both theirs and ours, will allay strife.
In times like these, less than enhancing,
“Hard times demand furious dancing!”
One wiser and more in the groove
than I am, says that we must “Move!”
James Cleveland sang “This too shall pass,”
Turn on his music and move your ass.

Thousands of people dance along
this wonderful old gospel song
in her mind’s eye and I agree.
While we are waiting, you and me,
for enough others to see the light
and step in line to wage the fight,
we have to keep the joy in us
in spite of this unholy fuss
that seeks to keep us frightened and
prisoners in our native land.

Instead of knives and swords and guns,
defeat the tyrant with jokes and puns.
Comedians will save the day
and keep us laughing on the way.
But in the mean time, move your feet.
Feel the rhythm. Feel the beat.
If this nation has a chance,
perhaps we’ll find it in the dance.

The quotations above are all from Alice Walker’s talk. In prose form, here again are her five principles for getting through the Trump years (or hopefully, months.)

1. Kindness, which can keep us going through these unkind times.

2. A close connection with nature.

3. Respect for our oldest biological ancestors including native Americans (specifically those at Standing Rock), Africans  (who survived the fierce physical brutality of slavery) and Europeans such as John Brown and Susan B. Anthony.

4.  ‘Move!  Hard times demand furious dancing.’ Reverend James Cleveland sang, “This too shall pass.”  Get a recording of it and dance to it! She has an image of thousands of people dancing to this wonderful gospel song.

5. Maintain gratitude for human life.

She ended by relating the importance of meditation, which she described as a means “to rediscover the blue sky that is our mind,” and by stating that one way we can overcome the constant bad news with which our oppressors drug us is to learn the bad news first from comedians. This, perhaps, is one way for us to get through this dark period in our history.

The prompt today was rhythmic.

Sunset at Cambry Woods

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Sunset at Cambry Woods

In the forest, wild and lush,
hear the music of the thrush
break the stillness of the brush.
If else disturbs it, make it hush,
for we have fled the world’s mad crush
with all its craziness and rush
that grinds sensation into mush,
distilling it as mindless slush.
The world flares up, the clouds are plush
as we see all its bloodshed flush
into the sunset’s subtle blush.

The prompt today was lush.

Simple

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Trying to keep it simple is harder than you think.
Each time I straighten out my life, fate adds another kink.

Today’s prompt was “Simple“.

Devastation Station

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IMG_0223 Devastation Station

Our beautiful world licks her wounds
and limps around us, twirling her skirts
to blow dry dust, then empties her wash water
in deluges that flush away even more.
Not content with the bounty she provides,
they gauge her skin and pick her scabs,
feeding her poison every day.

Rich men lauded for their tax-deductible charity, get richer
by purloining more of the earth’s bounties
that they call their own.
Super yachts and super models  
give testimony to their greatness,
obscuring lurid details
of their journeys to success.

Their trophy wives marry desolation,
then furnish it themselves ever after—
future alimony little enough reward
for the sale of life and dignity.
The social pages full of the same old story—
old men professing their virility
by photos taken with presidents and starlets.

They  reillustrate their own lives with
records of success on study walls,
like rich wallpaper obscuring scars
they’ve left around them in the world.
Hiding stories of devastation
the world keeps choosing
to reward them for.

 

 

The prompt word today was “devastation.”

Overworked or Labor Shirked?

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Overworked or Labor Shirked?

It’s hard for me to find the middle
between hard labor and the fiddle.
Work? I either overdo it
or endeavor to eschew it.
Work all day and then all night,
being very erudite—
putting words down on the page,
imprisoned in my muse’s cage.

Perhaps I fear my distant past
when good work habits didn’t last
and days were spent in dreaming or
novels read behind closed door—
midnight radio a chance
for fantasies to spin romance.
Whole days stretched as though to catch
an errant dream of true love’s match.

I feared such days were sloth, and yet
perhaps they were just roads to get
to the place where I would tell
the stories that I knew so well
because I’d lived them first in dreams
or days just bursting at the seams
with doing nothing but living life—
its pleasures, problems, romance, strife.

First the doing at my leisure,
then the writing, and the seizure
of all the details of the past
that, once down on paper, are made to last.
Overworked or over-lived,
life first collected, then finely sieved.
Panned like gold to find the treasure—
leisure and work in even measure.

“Overworked” is the prompt word today.

Check List for a Budding Poet

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Check List for a Budding Poet

If you want to be prolific,
better that you be specific,
and when you choose to state each fact,
try to make each word exact.
Don’t use time-worn words or wilted.
Avoid pretentious words or stilted.

Never try to force a rhyme.
Do not fail to take the time
to make your lines scan smoothly for,
uneven meter is a bore.
Words written for effect are hollow,
but where heart is, the head will follow.

So write your poetry from the heart.
Put your horse before the cart
and let it pull you up the hill.
Let your words express their will—
you following blindly, just to see
what the next line wants to be.

Let words of different shapes and sizes
furnish pleasure and surprises.
Make your poems resemble zoos
of striped okapis and kangaroos.
Delight yourself and then your reader.
Follow words, then be their leader

by whipping them in line and order,
shaping them within your border.
It never is too late to change
an errant line that’s out of range,
but editing is not what you
initially should seek to do.

Words give hearts tongues to share their pleasure
and their pain in equal measure.
Essayists and authors strive
to make their writings come alive.
They show us where their minds have been,
but poets put the music in.

The prompt today was “specific.”

Float Trip

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Etching, p/a by Isidro Xilonzóchitl, jdbphoto 

Float Trip

When I feel life’s wear and tear
and wilt before rude gossip’s stare,
feeling vulnerable and bare,
as though I cannot get my share
of fresh, unviolated air,
I rise above the jarring glare
in search of space that is more rare,
willing to pay whatever the fare
to rise above the world’s nightmare
and hang suspended, without care.

There I soar, I risk, I dare.
It does not matter what I wear.
I don’t regret my thinning hair,
my widening waist or derriere.
I do not fear that speeding mare
that cuts the night to bring despair.
Rue not that life has been unfair.
Need neither mask nor nom de guerre,
for when things get too much to bear,
I float myself right out of there

to revel in my inner lair.

 

img_1903painting by Salvador, jdbphoto

The prompt word today was “float.”

 

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

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You Have Become the Art You Lived For

The caustic smell of metal in your sweat
that by the end could fill the room,
as though the bronzes you had formed
had now invaded you
and filled you, blood and fiber.
Art can’t hurt you,
declared your favorite T-shirt,
colorful and now the final irony
of your life.

My dear,
art brought about your ending
as surely as it made your life,
yet you would have loved the bittersweet joke
as your kids and I
dressed you in that T-Shirt
for your final viewing.

You surround me even now—
brought two thousand miles
from Northern California
to middle Mexico.
The life you hoped to live, I live with those
who know you only through
your spiral lamp of stone and liana and paper,
Chi Wara standing feathered, bronze and tall,
the nude I posed for, on her side
with sticks for head and feet and cassowary feathers
hanging down from them,
the spirit sled of beaten copper, rawhide and willow—
all of them as exotic as you
never felt yourself to be.

They were beautiful and rare
and loved as you were.
How maddening
that you could not be
convinced of it.

That is why, when I think of you
now, so many years after,
the air grows pungent
with your memory.

(click on first photo to enlarge all)

For some reason, this is the only photo I have of the spiral lamp. I’ll replace it with a better one later.

 

 

To see more of Bob’s art and read another poem about him, go HERE.

 

The prompt today is “pungent.”

Blind Judgment

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dsc08411“Macho” by Judy Dykstra-Brown, jdbphoto  

Blind Judgment

Wielding words like bludgeons, they stumble through our world,
supporting fools as their gods, confederate flags unfurled.
Motivated more by hate than any rational thought,
they’d have no more spices added to our melting pot.

Hooligans wielding bludgeons as simple as a vote
cannot see the truth of what their voting might denote.
A businessman with ethics determined by the dollar
seems to have convinced them he’s the friend of the blue collar.

Bankruptcy and divorces, rash words and rasher actions.
Tax-dodging obligations, like a child in his reactions.
His minions yielding bludgeons, be they cudgels, guns or mallets,
now have it in their power to trash the world with ballots.

So all these bleating sheep with their lovely little daughters
will feed them to misogyny, like lambs led to their slaughters.
What leads nations on in these times of mass delusion?
Tomfoolery and hate and fear can lead to mass confusion.

We’ve seen it down through history with Hitler and Pol Pot.
Attila and Idi Amin, Gaddafi and Sadat.
All the blind majority led onward by a dunce.
All the dark sides of the world coming out at once.

Please, fathers love your daughters and mothers love your sons.
Protect them from the hatred of bigots wielding guns.
From politicians inventing facts and changing history,
leaving devastation wherever they might be.

We’re taught that justice must be blind to shield in its detection
of prejudice, and yet that selfsame blindness in election
may lead to faulty judgment that leads to foolish acts.
We should not cast our ballots when blinded to the facts.

 

The prompt today was “bludgeon.”

Sand Castles

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Sand Castles

Under the sand are palaces. I’ve seen them in my dreams:
vast halls and empty chambers smoothly rounded at their seams.
Every wall is made of sand. Each ceiling, archway, floor––
as though carved by master craftsmen, digging at its core––
is so magnificent, you’d think they were the stuff of lore.
You may also see them, but you must provide the door.

Though the chambers are filled in, they’re there without a doubt.
You are the one creating them by what you will scoop out.
The beauty’s hidden in the sand, waiting in your sleep
for you to dig the castles out from where they’re buried deep.
All your day’s exhaustion your dream labor will abort,
for what you build in slumber is work of a different sort.

Sand brought to the surface is what you get to keep
of subterranean palaces dug out in your sleep.
As you build aboveground castles in the world that we all know,
you reveal the outward structure of the inner rooms below,
furnishing the magic that the world will see through you,
showing what’s inside of you by what you bring to view.

I’m going in for a medical procedure today, so no time to write a fresh poem. This is  a rewrite of a poem from a few years ago that fits today’s prompt of “underground.”

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/underground/