Category Archives: Uncategorized

Day and Night, For Wordle 603

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Day and Night

Every night when you emerge to climb down from your heart
and shed your daily mystery, you become a part
of what we were before they clashed—my daily life and yours—
before I rubbed against your nerves  and you shut certain doors.
The very night bows down to gather round the slivered moon,
arched lighter on the verge of it, celebrating June.
You forsake your manly bearing and go against your grain,
show flashes of your tenderness that I’ve sought out in vain.
This is our nightly honeymoon that makes the day a breeze,
limbering up the stiffness and thawing out the freeze.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 603 the prompts are: heart you emerge night climb bow grain mystery clash flashes verge bearing The photo is of Rosemary and Jim, both now sadly departed. They were not a couple but I love this photo and thought it formed a good illustration for the poem.

Putting Words in Our Mouths

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Putting Words in Our Mouths

I do not choose and do not opt
that any of your prompts be cropped,
I know that your third word is crop
(whose past tense I have put up top,
knowing that it wouldn’t do
to alter any words that you
picked to give us as a test,
because I know that you know best.)
So know that I did not intend
to add that “ped” and thus offend.
I wrote it in addition to
the “crop” word provided by you.

The words for the Three Things Challenge are choose, opt and crop.

Three by Three

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I loved the joy of this trio on the San Juan Malecon. Surely they were too young to be her parents so it must have been lovers with one of their siblings.

Click on photos to enlarge

For Carol Cormier’s Thursday Trio Prompt

Love Letters: Body of Love for NaPoWriMo 2023, Day 28

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 “Did you know that the parts of letters all have names — including spines, shoulders, hairlines, ears, arms, legs, tails, and crotches?” (FromThe Complete Manual of Typography, A Guide to Setting Perfect Type,” by James Felici.) Thanks to Elizabeth Boquet for this information, which prompted this poem:

Body of Love

Stiff spine
of its beginning,
the bare shoulders
of its attraction.

I trace the hairlines
of your thoughts,
whisper love poems
into your ears.

Imagine you
wrapped around me:
arms, legs—
that animal remembrance
of primordial tails.

This is the womb of poetry,
giving birth to words.
I offer you a bouquet of them .

                                                                                                       –Judy Dykstra-Brown

For NaPoWriMo 2023, Day 28

Sculpted

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Sculpted

These lines upon my face are ripple marks that represent
all of my life’s ebb and flow, those tides that life has sent.
Calligraphy defining those advantages provided
along with life’s misfortunes that somehow I abided.

Life gives and takes away, sometimes in equal measure—
pain spicing our life as surely as the pleasure—
smile lines as well as creases left by frowns.
Surely, there’s no shortage of life’s ups and downs.

It is the hand of nature sculpting animal and flower,
altering and remolding hour after hour.
From dinosaur to newborn babe—fish and bird and tree,
there is no end to our world’s originality.

Time is the finest sculptor of everything we see.
It is the very master of creativity.
Animal, vegetable, mineral—no two things quite the same.
Constant alteration is evolution’s game.

 

Prompt words today are ripple marks, represent, spice, definition, shortage and advantage.

Man Vs. Machine

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Man Vs. Machine

It is expedient that we convene
to discuss this new machine.
With teamwork, could we not achieve
all our higher-ups believe
needs to be done by this contraption
that according to its caption
can do the work of many men,
perhaps, it says, the work of ten?

Farewell to manpower, hello panic.
Made obsolete by things mechanic!
While ensconced in our cocoons,
it seems that corporate buffoons
have been brisk to seal our fate
and, alas, we’ve learned too late
that man by man, we’ll be ejected
by this means today detected.

And this is why I’m doubly keen
on dealing with this damn machine,
for men have brains but robots don’t.
If we retaliate, it won’t,
I think that we should make the hit
and simply throw a wrench in it!
Thereby persuading all our bosses
of better ways to stem their losses.

Word prompts today are cocoon, brisk, teamwork, expedient, discuss and farewell.

Bucket Listless

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Bucket Listless

Before I have to face the heavenly ordeal—
(perhaps discovering that what I’ve scoffed at is for real.)
Before I kick the bucket, and while I’m still alive,
I’ve been told I have to choose a thing or five
and label them my “bucket list,” a practice I abhor,
(and even if I did, I can only think of four
things that might elate me as I shuffle toward the door.)

If I had the energy, I’d surely take to wing
and fly to foreign spaces to see everything
I didn’t see the first time, when I was in my youth
and as short of brains as  I was short of tooth.
Something about youth draws fortune to our side,
and when you bring up adventure, I think of ones I tried
and shake my head in wonder, surprised that no one died.

I’d like to go to Ireland or on a last safari,
or maybe back to India to replace the sari
I buried my dear cat in because he loved it so,
yet I fear my energy is at an all-time low,
so I will spend my dotage sitting in my chair,
thinking of adventures that I do not dare
pursuing, for I find I dread their wear and tear!!!

Prompts today are: bucket list, elated, heavenly, ordeal, alive and wings.

Stating the Obvious

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Stating the Obvious

We’ve hit a cosmic bottleneck and every day I rue it,
for I have the feeling that we will not make it through it.
They’ve indexed the world’s problems, but knowing that they’re there
seems to do very little in solving the nightmare.

We do not yield to pressure to try to cure the ills.
We only seem to kneel before the moneyed class’s wills.
We temper fear with hope that someone else will solve the puzzle
of the fact the whole damn world is staring down a muzzle.

Kids shoot other kids with guns but adults do not care
so long as the NRA sanctions the warfare.
We ban those from our borders who clean up all our messes,
then wonder why we’re drowning here in our own excesses.

Amazon sells refreshments as we all just sit and watch
as climate change keeps shifting the danger up a notch.
Meanwhile, the rich get richer and we ignore the poor
as the ones who need it least acquire more and more.

The polar caps are melting as California burns,
and in between, the drought and floods keep on taking turns.
Hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones mount and mount,
raising the fatalities higher than we can count.

Nobody knows the answer for how to please us all,
yet we forget we all are one on this great blue ball.
If only we could find a way to even out the score
and give up some of what we’ve got so others can have more.

Sacrifice fossil fuel to give the world a chance.
Tear down the oil derricks. Replace them with plants.
Make sure the rich pay taxes on a par with all the rest.
Admit that we don’t own the Earth. We are just its guest!!!

 

Prompts today are temper, index, cosmic, bottleneck, kneel and refreshments.

Writer’s Block

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Writer’s Block

This poem will go unspoken, unwritten, unconceived.
It will have no mentor by which it’s been received.
It won’t be manufactured to become a hot bestseller,
in fact it won’t be read by you nor any other feller!

This poem’s an ice-blocked river with words jammed up inside it—
each word imbricated with a word stacked up beside it.
I just don’t have the wherewithal by which I can procure them
and turn them into poems where you might have to endure them!

 

Prompt words today are imbricate, procure, river, mentor, manufacture and unspoken. Image by Anomaly on Unsplash.

Alignment

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The sun setting directly behind this mountain near where I live gives the effect of a volcanic eruption.

For the Whatsoever is Lovely prompt Week 16