I signed on to dVerse Poets Open Link Night post to find the prompt, but in addition, I found this wonderful post by Linda Lee Lyberg which I have to share with you…both her story of her husband’s proposal and a wonderful poem by Neruda. I hope you enjoy both. HERE is the link.
Click on photos to enlarge.
Teen Wisdom
The children are all burgeoning into adolescence,
though like shaken sodas, they emerge with effervescence.
Not thinking of the consequences, behavior audacious,
argumentative and therefore maddeningly pugnacious.
Parents’ beliefs are fallacies. Teens think that only they
have the means and knowledge to clearly know the way
to surge into the future, the internet their guide—
believing all its stated truths are bonafide.
They don’t listen to their parents because, for sure, they’re wrong.
They’d rather get their wisdom from TikTok or a song.
For this generation, electronic media rules,
dispensing equal wisdom from sages and from fools.
Is it truth or fiction? Is it wack or cool?
How can they know the difference? Clearly, hormones rule.
Prompts today are consequences, fallacy, pugnacious, burgeon, mean and soda.
(The non-teen who wrote this poem was so wack that she misspelled TikTok as TikToc. Some teenager just clued her in.) And to be fair, there are probably just as many adults misguided by the internet as there are teens who are.
Postcard from an Old Work Buddy
Shifted my focus,
turned 45 degrees to the right,
began walking.
Ended up near the equator,
removed my shoes,
wiggled free toes in the sand.
Plucked new fruit from an unnamed tree.
Suffered no ill-effects.
New life, suits me fine. Wish you were here.?
For dVerse poets Quadrille Prompt: Shift
To see other Quadrilles on this topic go HERE.
Gain and Loss
I’ve found I simply must inure
myself to things I must endure.
I’m overweight and immature
and told my writing is obscure—
written in a dialect
that people find hard to detect.
I joined a gym, but now my trainer
says he cannot make it plainer
than to say I won’t lose weight
until I choose to fill my plate
with other food and smaller portions
to decrease present proportions.
I thought if I became a spinner
I’d become a weight-loss winner,
but in fact, no pounds I’m doffing—
only panting, wheezing, coughing.
But I didn’t waste the time.
At least I came up with this rhyme.
Now perhaps if you’d elect
to check my poem’s dialect,
you’d find that though my waist and thighs
have not decreased in girth or size,
perhaps I have lost one small thang.
Have I lost, perhaps, my Dakota twang?
Today’s prompt words are winner, dialect, coughing, proportion, trainer and obscure. Image by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.
Reading Challenged
Diana Gabaldon’s romances are way too historic.
Koolkosherkitchen‘s recipes? Delicious, but caloric.
Mo Willems counts on pigeons to chase away the blues,
but I’d never volunteer to fill any pigeon’s shoes
due to my fear of flying, so even in a pinch,
to read of being airborne causes me to flinch.
Can’t read Cormac McCarthy or Murakami either.
When violence erupts in books, I have to take a breather.
Harlequin romances are too mushily romantic,
for I prefer my novels less sexually pedantic.
All-in-all you might have guessed I’ve little left to read
and so instead I write all day to satisfy my need
to hang out with a word or two that has not been written
by writers such as those above by whom I’ve not been smitten.
And though my poems aren’t edible or sexually explicit,
violent or airborne, I feel it is implicit
that I need an appointment with my therapist to see
if I can even stomach silly verses penned by me!
Prompt words are pinch, historic, appointment, volunteer, and flying. Image by Brendan Stephens on Unsplash.
Dreamworld
My dreams are irregular and I cannot control them.
Every night I enter them in order to patrol them.
Sometimes I feel marooned there, like a miner with no pick,
a writer with no pencil, a conductor with no stick.
Vanity is left behind. No room for it in dreams.
Life’s garment that we’ve sewn with care is ripped out at its seams.
It does no good to gripe or moan that you have lost control,
for dreams move us outside ourselves as though that is their goal.
On the outside looking in, our life becomes a role
in which we play ourself in our quest to find our soul.
Prompts today are dreams, irregular, maroon, gripe, miner and vanity.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 