Virtual World
Beamed into this lifetime, we’re bitten, bruised and lost,
not knowing it’s a virtual world into which we’ve been tossed.
Reality a spectrum whose limits have been blurred,
how many feel their life is just a thing to be endured?
If that grand player tweaks the board a bit, adding more disaster,
might the game be over an eon or two faster?
If he adds another virus to aids and chicken pox,
If he bundles up more pieces and throws them in the box,
will Earth breathe her final breath at last, gasping, torn and weak?
Is that the master game move? Is that his final tweak?
Or will the game start over with new rules the next round?
And will the moves go smoother once new game pieces have been found?
Wordle prompts today are: beam, virtual, box, bruise, bit, lost, spectrum, torn, tweak, bundle, breathe and time. HERE is the link to read other submissions for this prompt. Image by Robert Coelho on Unsplash, used with permission.
After a huge thunderstorm, the rain stopped and I went out to take an after-midnight swim. Luckily, I’d taken my iPhone out to listen to a book as I did my water exercises, and used it to try to capture a photo of a rare firefly that clung to the branch of an Areca palm hanging out over the water. I couldn’t capture it, but luckily it did make me notice an incredible moon and cloud tableau over my neighbor’s house that is pictured in the gallery below. This is the scene: mist surrounding and rising up into the night-chilled air from the hot water of my geothermally heated pool, clouds swirling around the moon. Click on the individual photos below to enlarge them.
For Hammad’s Weekend Sky Prompt.
Enough
At six o’clock, glib comments start to fill the air.
We’re hungry for frittata, but the table’s bare.
Darkness fills the kitchen, for mama’s gone on strike.
She’s gone off to the city. Alone, on papa’s bike.
It’s dicey whether she’ll return. She says she’s tired of cooking.
She’s in need of a vacation and so she made a booking
at a posh hotel that has its own cafe
where she will dine on coq au vin followed by crème brûlée.
For once, serving the rest of us will not be her fate.
Someone else will wait on her and she’ll just sit and wait.
In the morning she will order service in her room
where she’ll not even make her bed or wield dust cloth or broom.
Her note says then she might come home, or she might just wait
and find a nice seaside resort where she can cogitate
for another day or two. She says we shouldn’t worry.
The pizza place delivers if we’re not in a hurry.
Her recipe book’s on the shelf. The stove is under it.
Her apron’s in the closet and she’s sure that it will fit
each and every one of us while she is on vacation.
She says that fending for ourselves will be an education.
She says to wash the dishes even though it is a bore,
for if she sees a messy kitchen when she walks in the door,
she’s going to walk right out again until we prove we’ve learned
that things will be real different after Mama has returned!
Prompts for today are six, glib, frittata, dicey and darkness.
What a strong and effective statement.
Fandango- definitely a “who won the week” contender🙂
Small Towns in the Fifties
Tight pants were forbidden. Baggy trousers were the rule.
And if you ever broke it, they sent you home from school.
Even the most nervy girls didn’t take the chance
to show up in assembly wearing sexy pants.
There were no vivid colors in our little town.
The houses that weren’t painted white for sure were tan or brown.
All the local color resided in its folks.
Their foibles and their oddities comprised the local jokes.
Gullible new arrivals were sure to take the lure
and all the timeworn stories, therefore have to endure.
The time that Arlan Boe did this and Ellen Jones did that.
The time that Shirley Carson put Bon Ami in Dolph’s hat.
The trick that old Jeff Halverson played on the new teacher.
Crank phone calls that the Watts boys made to the new Baptist preacher.
It seems rules of propriety extended just so far.
In a small town what you look like matters more than what you are.
Prompt words today are baggy trousers, lure, forbidden, nervy and brown. (The names and acts are all fictional, although the message perhaps is not.)
‘It’s gone the way the mist is burned off the hollows in broken ground when the sun comes out,’ the Colonel said. ‘And you’re the sun.’
–Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
Self-Elegy by Muse
I am here to shine sunlight into shaded places—
those crooks and crannies in your caves of memory
where you’ve been stuffing your secrets for years,
half remembering
whether they were facts
or nightmares softened
by a mother’s hand upon your brow
or by the soothing balm of forgetfulness.
I am both muse and confessor,
accepting you at your word
and issuing indulgences.
I turn a flood into a mist, the mist into a poem,
the poem into immortality
coined from dark things scattered by the light
I bring them to.
For the dVerse Poets Tuesday Poetics prompt
Helpmate
I treasure your good nature—your kindnesses and grins.
How you do not fustigate me for my many sins.
You tackle my complexities and understand my meaning,
sort through my poor excuses and somehow end up gleaning
positive from negative, just remembering what
in any lesser person would be the details cut.
You bring out the best in me so I’m a better man—
living by not what I did but by what I can.
You help me aim for goals that without you I’d disdain,
constantly reminding me of what I can attain.
Prompt words are tackle, treasure, fustigate, category and glean
Gardening in the Rain
It started with a gentle tug
to trim a succulent from a jug
stuffed full with hardy hens and chicks
but tugs turned into pulls and picks
Until the pockets of my pants
and both my hands were full of plants.
By then, I was already soaked,
for as I pushed and pulled and poked,
the storm that had been gentle drops,
turned into pelts and then to plops.
Since cool rain was a respite from
days of heat and glaring sun,
I loitered some along the way
to see what new additions lay
along the path that stretched between
the lower garden where I’d been
and the house far up above—
that toasty place—that cushy glove.
But then there was that empty pot
(whose jade plant we’d moved to the lot)
where there was dirt but plants were not
and all those cuttings I’d just got
stuffing my pockets, filling hands.
Can you see how the plot expands?
Thus it went that for an hour
I stood there in the soaking shower
restoring beauty to the pot
where formerly beauty was not.
Then, dripping in my sopping clothes,
I used my sleeve to swipe my nose
and shed my clothes all at the door,
tracked wet prints across the floor,
hung up wet clothes and dried my skin,
then used the towel to wrap me in,
and meant to dress and have a meal,
but couldn’t help it, had to steal
to the window for one look more,
then opened up the sliding door,
and, one hand clasping tight the towel,
I headed out with garden trowel
to add if needs be one plant more
to the pot planted before.
I love gardening in the rain.
and see no reason to abstain.
With no sun to scorch my skin,
no reason to remain within.
And since I loved where i had been,
What I did once, I did again.
(Click on photos to enlarge and read captions to hear the rest of the story.)
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 