Raining for the second day in a row. Thank goodness!
Hope you are feeling better, Cee! This little ham is succulent in a different way than you might have imagined.
For Cee’s FOTD
For Fibbing Friday, we were asked to define these terms:
2. Antediluvian: The state of a cucumber before it is subjected to the pickling process.
3. Serrefine: What a drunk covers his leftover food with before refrigerating it.
4. Guetapens: I like Scripto, Pilot or Uni Ball.
5. Promiscuous: Naughty behavior at a high school dance.
6. Tendentious: The state of a dental patient before surgery.
7. Kismet: What one dinosaur said to another during foreplay.
8. Autochthonous: Having the natural ability to pronounce digraphs correctly.
9. Macerate: Describing food cut up for you by your mother.
10. Gladiolus: The attribution of human emotions to flowers.
For Fibbing Friday. (Thanks, Forgottenman, for furnishing the link and the prod.) T-Rex Image by NBC News.
Reliquary
On Sunday morning under orange bougainvillea,
your picture spills from an old album.
You were on a verandah under purple bougainvillea,
drinking the hot noon from your coffee cup
as I drank passion fruit and watched Lake Tana birth the Nile.
Later, kneeling by the river, I made my hand into a cup,
but you called out that slow death swam the blood
of those who touched the river,
while behind you on harsh branches,
black birds barked stark music.
Now, on Sunday morning under orange bougainvillea,
half a world and half a life away,
I restore you to your proper place, remembering how,
when they laid you down to dream beneath the purple bougainvillea,
it was passion fruit’s sweet poison that flavored my life.
This is a poem from my book If I Were Water and You Were Air, to be published soon,
For RDP: Relic
I swear these photos are not staged. When I walked around the garden to find a flower to photograph for Cee’s FOTD, I found these reminders of my gardener Pasiano, just as though he’d left a trail for me to follow. And he had, of course, departed for the day. I guess picking up after him is easier than doing all my own gardening. Plus, he did fix the broken pipe my plumber never did come back to fix, so I forgive him his trespasses.
For those of you who read my “Fancy Word” poem early on, I discovered hours after I published it that the last word of the penultimate line as well as the entire last line had been left off the poem! Ironically, the second to the last word of the penultimate line rhymed with the two lines above it, so the deletion wasn’t obvious, but it is funnier with the last line, so here is the poem with all of its lines. I’ve also corrected it on the original, so if you read it later on, you’ve already seen this version:
Fancy Words
Don’t we adore fancy words? Don’t we love to use them?
Still, it is annoying when some choose to abuse them.
When “geddouddahere” would do to tell pests when to go,
they use “begone!” to banish them in words more rococo.
Their need to parlay simple words, I fear I find most gruesome.
A tasty meal’s not good enough. They see repasts most toothsome.
While we argue, they asservate, assiduously stating
things that all of the rest of us are fine with just debating.
They see themselves as bon vivants, most clever and most charming,
They complicate the simplest words at rates we find disarming.
A lady we call beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, cool,
they find pulchritudinous. Where did they go to school?
“Piquant” they use religiously, though most of us denounce it.
Yes, we agree it’s pretty, but we just can’t pronounce it.
Slow music is andante, dark closets are aphotic.
As they rave on, each alloquy tends to get hypnotic.
What the rest of us get rid of, they alleviate.
They do not use contractions. They don’t abbreviate.
They’re intent on gamboling while we’re just being silly.
They see the landscape undulating. We just find it hilly.
Forsooth, they have no wherewithal to get where they must go?
We’re all willing to chip in. We hope they don’t go slow!
They are extremely irritating, though they do not know it.
It’s not easy dealing with a friend who is a poet!!!
Fancy Words
Don’t we adore fancy words? Don’t we love to use them?
Still, it is annoying when some choose to abuse them.
When “geddouddahere” would do to tell pests when to go,
they use “begone!” to banish them in words more rococo.
Their need to parlay simple words, I fear I find most gruesome.
A tasty meal’s not good enough. They see repasts most toothsome.
While we argue, they asservate, assiduously stating
things that all of the rest of us are fine with just debating.
They see themselves as bon vivants, most clever and most charming,
They complicate the simplest words at rates we find disarming.
A lady we call beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, cool,
they find pulchritudinous. Where did they go to school?
“Piquant” they use religiously, though most of us denounce it.
Yes, we agree it’s pretty, but we just can’t pronounce it.
Slow music is andante, dark closets are aphotic.
As they rave on, each alloquy tends to get hypnotic.
What the rest of us get rid of, they alleviate.
They do not use contractions. They don’t abbreviate.
They’re intent on gamboling while we’re just being silly.
They see the landscape undulating. We just find it hilly.
Forsooth, they have no wherewithal to get where they must go?
We’re all willing to chip in. We hope they don’t go slow!
They are extremely irritating, though they do not know it.
It’s not easy dealing with a friend who is a poet!!!
For My Vivid Blog: Words
Must confess that I wrote this poem 7 years ago, but it seemed appropriate, so….
Undocumented spouses of American citizens will be shielded from deportation, provided work permits and given a pathway to citizenship, according to officials briefed on the plan.
Welcome to “The Numbers Game #26” Today’s number is 147. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find under that number and include a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.
This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below.
No Skin
As it grows hotter year by year,
then month by month,
we hide in our caves for protection,
for there is no skin to our world.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by fire.
The mountains are obscured by fire,
obscured again by smoke that still, alas,
is not a skin.
No skin. No. No skin left for our world.
No skin.
Our water boils in its pipes. No cool succor there.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams
where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart are not just theater
but reflect the sins of mankind,
who for purses of gold
have sold our world.
Now we all cook in the pan of their greed,
the protective skin of our world
sold off year by year
for yachts and palaces that share
the same vanished sky of the houses
where we cower for protection from that once-benevolent sun
under which in the past we spread ourselves to receive those rays
now turned lethal in this skinless world.
For this dVerse Poets prompt, we were to write a new poem that included 13 lines from a famous poem or one of our own old unpublished poems. I based my poem on these fragments from a poem I wrote years ago entitled “Evil World Scenario.”
No skin there.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by fire.
No skin. No. No skin left for our world.
No skin.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
Our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
That leads us into dreams–
Where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
The sins of the heart are just theater.
To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 