Category Archives: Uncategorized

Call to Arms

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Things That Cling


Call to Arms

Sweaters do it, slips do it.
Even crackers and clam dips do it.
Let’s do it. I want to cling!!!

Saran wrap was made for it.
Lonely hearts first lust then fade for it.
Just put your arms in a ring.

Hold me and squeeze with them.
I’m the thing that you should seize with them.
Want all the hugs you can bring.

Monkeys in trees do it,
pointer fingers when you sneeze do it.
Let’s do it. Let’s do that thing.

Don’t hesitate o’er it.
Gotta tell you that I adore it.
Let’s do it.  Let’s have a fling!!!

The prompt word today is “cling.”

Mystery Car Wash Flowering Tree: Flower of the Day, Jan 10, 2017

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Here is yet another stage of the flowers on the mystery tree, all stages present at the same time. Click to enlarge photos. Go HERE to see a later stage of the blooms.

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See Cee’s gorgeous hydrangeas HERE.

This Little Light of Mine

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images from internet

I was purified each Sunday, sitting on a child-sized wooden chair, belting out “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Sure of salvation, my only worry was whether I’d forget the Bible verse memorized by repeating it every morning and every night for the preceding week.

I was glorious holy, worrying about my dad, who put the harvest before church, trying to pray him back from a future Hell. Yes, there were happy ladies shepherding us up the back stairs from Sunday School to real church above; but there were also those who gave us brief flashes of the fires of Hell, who denied that perfect attendance bar for my Sunday School pin even when my excuse was a verified hospital stay to have my tonsils out. Muriel, the preacher’s daughter and my oldest sister’s best friend, stealing the bar to add to my Sunday School pin, anyway. Surely this member of a holy family herself validity enough to certify my perfect attendance in  intention if not in fact.

Where did it go, that round white enamel pin with the surrounding gold cluster for the second year and new bar hanging down each year thereafter for perfect attendance? I wore it with such pride. Did it blow away in the tornado that lifted my parents’ roof that year long after I had left? Was it stolen in the burglary at my house where 70 rings were stolen? Did divine intervention finally lift it from my possession?

The only certainty is that this pack rat did not throw it away. I am an artist of little things, joining them together to create stories of my life, the world and thoughts above this world. They are little lights of mine shining words and memories—little song medleys that belt the lyrics as surely as that basement room of children, sure in their conviction that somewhere out there in the universe, someone or something was watching them shine.

The prompt word today is “shine.”

Berry Beautiful: Flower of the Day, Jan 9, 2017

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I don’t know what bush/tree this was at the carwash, but it was exhibiting every stage of blooming at the same time—from first buds to flowers to these amazing clusters of berries.  I took seventeen shots, and got a clean car to boot!  I’ll show other stages later.

Click on first photo to enlarge both.

https://ceenphotography.com/2017/01/08/flower-of-the-day-january-9-2017-bearded-iris/

Cruel Infinity

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Cruel Infinity

I cannot face the infinite—
that colossal haunted house—
too many rooms seemingly empty
that teem with invisible somethings
that I can’t comprehend.
How could I find myself in such vastness?
What in those giant corridors knows I exist?
Ego, finally, my undoing, as I fear
becoming part of what I find impossible
to grasp.

Everything I am
yearns towards the specific—
fine detail being more or less
how I have spent my life.
How can such a life be reconciled
with the infinite? Everything
cycling up and up from nothing
and, we fear, back down again.
He who says that nature is not ironic
lies or simply refuses to face the truth.

It is a cruel infinity that has included
such a tiny space
for me.

The prompt today was “infinite.”

Still Christmas

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Here is the promised view of the entire Xmas tree at the Nueva Posada.  Every year, Judy Eger does a different fabulous tree.  See last year’s Here.  See this year’s below.  Christmas in Mexico lasts from Dec. 12 to Jan. 6, Three King’s Day.  Actually, it isn’t completely over until Candlemas on Feb. 2, but I imagine this tree will be taken down by then.  I wonder what she will do with all the angels? 

Click on first photo to enlarge all.

 

Sunday Trees – 269

So, How Long Has it Been?

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Not only long out of date, but long out of dates!!! Sad.

 

Widow’s Night Out

Her act that night when they first kissed
branded her an optimist.
She had rehearsed all afternoon
with an old rubber balloon,
then visited the pharmacy
just to see what she could see.
Believing that she lacked the nerve,
and feeling slightly like a perve,
she finally bought the dreaded thing–
shaped like a cap bound by a ring.
Yet sadly, seven years hereafter,
it’s simply grounds for rueful laughter,
for her wished-for evening’s ending
has been perpetually pending
until alas, it is too late.
Her dreams, it seems, are out-of-date!

 

The photo prompt was to photograph something with a name on it.

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.”

 

Float

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The prompt today is “float.”