“You are invited to a party at our house, Saturday at 7.
Please bring a dish to share and what you want to drink.”
Pot Luck?
What the F—?
If I’m to bring a dish to share and also what I drink,
just who’s throwing the party? It sounds like me, I think.
If I’m going to cook a dish and also buy the wine,
I think I’ll just stay home instead, where all of it is mine!
The purpose for a party is for entertaining friends—
Not the other way around. This said, my poem ends!
Plum Pit, Apple Core
Never saw an apple tree, never saw a plum
that I didn’t want to reach out and get me some.
Bite into the fleshy fruit. Chew around the pit.
Spit it out into my hand to get rid of it.
Dig a hole to bury it. Smooth it with my heel
to grow another fruit tree for a future meal.
Such a simple motion in a world grown gross—
most folks isolated, fearfully morose
about nature’s rebellion against humankind.
Reaching deep within her and taking what we find
without giving back again—everybody keen
on scraping out her riches with some grand machine.
For manifold acts of mankind, dangerous and mean,
nature has not found an adequate vaccine.
But, by giving back again, we signify devotion
to start to rectify our sins with a simple motion.
Let’s help her out by simply remaining aware
that each and every one of us needs to start to care.
By every single action, let’s demonstrate our wills
to rectify our heedlessness, atone for all our ills.
For everything that we take out, putting something back.
To therein change our dangerous course and take another tack.
Just a simple gesture, signifying more.
Building back our world pit after pit, core after core.
We talk about solutions, never coming close—
spewing words not actions, maddeningly verbose.
But if every person just took their life in hand,
polluting less, enriching their surrounding land,
perhaps we’d shift the balance, tree by tree by tree,
restoring our world to what it’s meant to be.
Click on photos to enlarge. Especially the first one!
Cee’s prompt was Real Vs. Fake. Hmm..which one is real? Big duck or little duck? Stuffed duck or wood duck? Sometimes it is hard to tell.
He scrubbed the bar with cleanser and moved apart the chairs
with six feet in between them and just a few in pairs.
He sterilized the counter with that gelatinous goo
that had become ubiquitous, as he was told to do.
He laid off all his servers and bartended well-masked,
ready to do with diligence whatever he was asked.
Yet his barstools sat neglected, for no one came to play
and his profit margin was shrinking every day.
His savings were depleted by rent and overhead
as all his favorite regulars stayed at home in bed.
When he looked at the percentages, he knew he had to act.
In one month he’d be ruined—bankrupted, in fact.
He took a bottle of the gin he’d used to such acclaim,
forgot vermouth and olives, taking careful aim,
to spill it down the counter where it ran down to the rug,
then upset a candle and departed with a shrug.
Carefully he locked the door, got in his car and left.
Basically broken-hearted, feeling gutted and bereft.
He saw flames in his rear-view mirror, his problems rectified
as he took the only out, committing barmecide.
Prompts for today are cleanser, basic, barmecide, acclaim and percentage. Photo by Jack Prichett on Unsplash, used with permission.
P.S. If you wondered, as I did, what “barmecide” really means, as an adjective it means illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing. As a noun, it means a person who offers benefits that are illusory or disappointing. Nope, I just couldn’t inflict that upon you.
Mentor
That seed of you planted in me
directs me to turn from daily tasks
to look for lost things.
Then the dust of my past,
brushed from some recess of memory,
mixes with imagination to fabricate
a scrap of art, a poem, a tale.
After I wrote this, I couldn’t decide who to use to illustrate it. Then I noticed the “art, poem and tale” and realized I’d had a mentor in each genre. My mother for poetry, my husband for art and my father as storyteller.
A quadrille is a poem with exactly 44 words. The dVerse poets prompt asks us to write a quadrille that contains the word seed. Here is a link to the dVerse Poets page where you can read other responses to the prompt.
