Kudzu
By the statue of the satyr where the kudzu is the thickest,
I toil pulling roots out, and I swear I am the quickest.
Every place I see the vine, I vow that I will best it.
I remove it from the soil, conquering it lest it
cover all my property from here up to the sea,
knowing if it had its way, that it would cover me!!!
Prompt words today are satyr, place, kudzu, toil, root and me.
This is the bouquet that just keeps giving. Now that the roses have fallen, the lililes are in full bloom. Gorgeous.
For Cee’s FOTD
School Reunion
We’re grateful for the tiger in his ancient baseball shirt.
He’s still sliding into bases while we’re dishing out the dirt.
Non-Trumper against Trumper, human rightist against bigot,
all the ways we’ve grown apart, gushing from the spigot.
When the debate gets heated, he brings about a shift,
repeating old glories until we get his drift
and switch our conversation way back to the past
to all those high school memories that thankfully still last
and that turn the party back to what it should have been:
turning old friends back to what they all were way back when.
Prompts today are heater, party, grateful, tiger and shift. Image by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash.
Bad News
Life puts a bookmark on our pain
so we can visit it again.
Read its memory and absorb
the angst of our whole spinning orb.
Day after day, the pain is writ
in newspapers that carry it
to every mountaintop and shore.
As time advances, there’s always more.
Everywhere we share the pain.
Love is born, then lost again.
Countries advance but at the cost
of what another country’s lost.
The riches that the rich accrue
are for working man to rue.
One needs an exoskeleton
to protect him from the ill they’ve done.
War and pestilence and greed
are given growth to by the need
of mankind to accrue still more
through exploitation and through war.
There’s no escaping behind a door,
for daily, News just brings us more.
Prompt words today are exoskeleton, absorb, working, advance, lover, bookmark. Images from Unsplash.
Oops. Looks like the exoskeleton link didn’t work yesterday, so here it is again today: https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/rdp-wednesday-exoskeleton/
Not flashy but I love the quiet color of this bougainvillea.
For Cee’s FOTD. See her stunning tulip HERE.
Bugbear
My bugbear really is a bear, but it does more than bug me.
When I take a walk in woods, I fear that one will hug me.
I shake in terror every time I hear a dry branch crack,
afraid that I might have a bear descend upon my back.
My footsteps are deliberate. I do not want attention,
fearing that a grizzly bear will demand my detention.
At church camp I stayed with the group as we walked to chapel,
imagining a black bear with his sharp claws like a scalpel
ripping through my backpack and shredding through my tee,
getting down to business. Getting down to me.
When father saw something was wrong as he heard my confession,
he said that i could tell him all, that it was his profession
to listen to the foibles and the fears of kids like me.
Whatever worries I might have, he could set me free.
And so I told everything—my excessive worry
that I might encounter something clawed and toothed and furry.
Then he disqualified my fears and did it in a hurry,
by saying that God put no bears in central Missouri!!!!
Prompts today are bugbear, profession, disqualified, deliberate, shake, chapel. Image by Mana on Unsplash.
For Cee’s FOTD
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 