For Cee’s FOTD
Click on photos to enlarge.
First Step
Looking out of your front door
there is a whole world to explore.
Standing here behind the glass,
you only need to choose to pass
into that world wherein your muse
will enter you to help you choose
which world you’ll hold within your hands.
Which foreign soil. Which country’s sands.
If you falter. If you sigh,
doubt yourself and wonder why,
feel yourself less fit and spry
and fear that you will not get by,
issue yourself a reprimand.
Pack your bag and take your hand
and lead yourself outside the door.
This leaving’s what a door is for.
Gather up your courage and
set off for that foreign land.
Prompts for today are looking out of my front door, glass, muse, spry and hands.
And, for Thursday Doors.
Mutter
Did you hear the scandal? Did you hear the “rumor?”
Did she break a fingernail? Does she have a tumor?
She isn’t going to write a poem. She doesn’t like one word
suggested as a prompt today. She thinks they are absurd.
Nothing to rhyme with “traffic.” She’d rather play in it
than try to think up any rhyme if “ruckus” has a say in it.
Her salad days are over. She’s too old to be this clever.
When she saw the word “cycle,” her muse just muttered, “Never!”
So for the second time this week, she’s whining and complaining.
But I see the prompt words tricked her, for she used them while explaining!
Prompt words today are traffic, rumor, cycle, ruckus and salad.
Photo by my sister Patti Arnieri
Sweet Clover
Before our dad told us its real name,
we used to call it wild mustard.
What did we know about sweet clover except for its color
and that summer smell, cloying in its sugared perfume.
It filled the air and smothered the plains—
bright yellow and green where before
brown stubble had peeked through blown snow.
On these dry lands, what flowers there were
tended to be cash crops or cattle feed.
Sweet clover or alfalfa.
The twitching noses of baby rabbits brought home by my dad
as we proffered it to them by the handful.
Fragile chains we draped around our necks and wrists.
Bouquets for our mom
that wilted as fast as we could pick them.
Summers were sweet clover and sweet corn
and first sweethearts parked on country roads,
windows rolled down to the night air,
then quickly closed to the miller moths.
Heady kisses,
whispered confessions, declarations,
unkept promises.
What we found most in these first selfish loves
was ourselves.
The relief of being chosen
and assurance that all our parts worked.
Our lips accepting those pressures unacceptable
just the year before.
Regions we’d never had much congress with before
calling out for company.
That hard flutter
like a large moth determined to get out.
Finding to our surprise,
like the lyrics of a sixties song,
that our hearts could break, too.
Hot summer nights,
“U”ing Main,
cars full of boys honking
at cars full of girls.
Cokes at Mack’s cafe.
And over the whole town
that heavy ache of sweet clover.
Half promise, half memory.
A giant invisible hand
that covered summer.
The dVerse prompt today is to write a poem about a flower. Nice coincidence that I was working on this poem for a book about growing up in South Dakota and had just asked my sister if she had any photos of sweet clover. She did–and here are both the poem and the photo.
Hoarder
There are moments caught between heart-beats that fall into crevasses where they nourish our dreams. Streaming rivulets that escape our conscious daylight world swell these moments until they become full-grown nightly adventures––what we have hoped blended with what else might be possible, tempered by fears and regrets. What part of us orchestrates these dreams has never been discovered––some grand arranger of self that does not allow itself to be controlled by any conscious part of us, perhaps. It is a cinema we construct for ourselves—a relief from or a censor of or a collector of those parts of ourselves we would otherwise not deal with. Those parts of ourselves we struggle to forget and throw away? There is no detritus in our lives. Some great hoarder within us reaches out a hand to capture and arrange them, then calls them dreams.
The dVerse Poets Pub prompt today was to write a 144-word flash fiction piece making use of the first sentence in my essay above.
Turn about Does Not Play Fair
If your social popularity has wandered off the track,
here’s a little good advice to help you get it back.
Practice your endurance. Listen when friends tell
all those oft-heard stories, even though you know them well.
But don’t expect the same from them when they show inattention
with each repeated story that you are going to mention.
Your stories retold more than once lack the fascination
of their latest version of their favorite rumination.
Prompt words today are go, social, track, endurance and listen.
This photo used for illustrative purposes only. In no way is this poem actually about these two lovely women.
Pasiano has trimmed back the bougainvillea so this fern arch has to furnish the interest for awhile.
For Cee’s FOTD
The Temp in Accounting
His prospects of affluence seem to be shrinking
in direct proportion to what he’s been drinking.
Lately it seems that the hours he’s been working
are less than the hours that he has been shirking
his tasks of the day. When we look at his history,
I must admit it’s a bit of a mystery
why they’ve retained him for even this long,
for he’s more attached to his lighter and bong
than he is to his actuarial tables.
His financial projections? Primarily fables.
In short, his behavior is simply pubescent
and prospects of tenure likely evanescent.
When the boss went to find this latest young bloke,
he found he’d stepped out for his hourly toke.
All in all, I think I’m not amiss in projecting
he’ll be more temporary than he was expecting.
Prompts today are evanescent, history, prospect, affluent and working.
