Enigma
I take your arm.
I read your eyes.
Stare at the rage
your mien belies.
I raid your lips
with tongue and tooth
trying to find
your hoarded truth.
The whole of you
defies my test.
Does eye deceive
or does the rest?
This prompt requires I write a post making use of these five words: READ | ARM | RAID | STARE | RAGE |
https://secretkeeper.net/2018/03/12/weekly-writing-prompt-132/
Super Powers
In our wider world of pomp and dollar,
somehow power makes us smaller.
Distracts us from the metaphor
of what a super power’s for.
Those powers we seek In the vast world
wait within us to be unfurled.
In that world we’re given to create,
we hold the key to every gate.
We’re given vision, strength and power
to make a minute of an hour,
to leap ahead or lag behind
in our universe of mind.
I soar the heights. I swim the sea,
and delve the depths to try to free
those powers that I’ve found to be
in that vast space inside of me.
for dverse poets
For sixteen years, I’ve been watching Canadian and American expats flood into Mexico and most, no matter how charmed they might be with Mexico, have the same main complaint—the profusion of VERY LOUD sky rockets that are set off by the thousands during festivals, beginning at the very early hour (by gringo standards) of 6 A.M.
I have a piece myself, written on my first morning in Mexico 22 years ago when my husband and I awoke to what we were sure must be the cannon fire of a revolution in Oaxaca. Alarmed, we sat cowering in our room that thankfully opened onto an inside courtyard until the artillery ceased and the city seemed to awaken to a normal day. Familiar sounds of cars, donkeys, water vendors, gas vendors, vegetable vendors and motorcycles filled the morning air and we ventured out. Knowing no Spanish at the time, there was no one to ask about the early morning sounds of battle until we met another gringo couple in the Zocalo and asked if they knew what the early morning artillery fire had been about. They were polite and didn’t laugh too loud as they explained the Mexican fondness for cohetes (skyrockets) and their purpose.
After moving to Mexico a few years later, I became very well acquainted with their presence not only during holy festivals but also fiestas and celebrations of all sorts: weddings, birthdays, mother’s day, quinceañeras, christenings. After 16 years of living in this country of vivid colors, tastes and smells, noise seems to be as important as any other sensory excess while celebrating and living life. This poem, discovered in the bowels of my computer and written 20 years ago or more, now seems the norm:
San Miguel Morning
The sounds of rooting cats
like infanticide
accompany
tuba music
in 4/4 time.
Fireworks.
Roosters.
Donkey brays.
6:29 in the morning.
All’s right with the world.
If you are curious about just why all these skyrockets are necessary and why the complaints of gringo invaders will always fall on deaf ears, read this excellent article on cohetes by Craig Dietz.
The prompt today was noise.
I love this single tree on this little point of land backed up by some of the thousands of white pelicans that hang out near the fishery in Petatan on Lake Chapala. Click on photo to enlarge.
For Sunday Trees
jdbphoto
Just Beyond My Grasp
When I’ve passed a restless night,
to once more welcome morning light,
I do not leave a lover’s grasp.
No knitted legs need to unclasp.
What time on waking I can afford
is simply spent unwinding cord:
the earbud cord around my neck,
my PC power cord from the wreck
of pillows, comforter and sheet
that somehow, now, are at my feet.
My MacBook Air, just by my shoulder
has come unplugged and so is colder
to my touch. It won’t power on.
Then, when plugged in, my poem is gone.
This is part of a much longer poem written three years ago. The prompt today is grasp.
My buds are a bit dusted and cobwebbed compared to Cee’s. See Cee’s magnificent magnolia bud here.
Listen
If you would be captivating, learn this lesson well.
You won’t be so admired for the tales you choose to tell
as for the ones you listen to with your whole attention.
Your questions can define you as much as what you mention.
The prompt today was captivating.
Upright Midnight
Our night’s rest should meander, releasing us to dreams,
but my sleep took me on a trip down other sorts of streams
with rapids, eddies, waterfalls that jarred me rough awake.
I think that just one night like it is all that I could take.
Whenever I lay prone, I had another bout of coughing—
with one hack executed, another in the offing.
I could not lay my head down to soothe myself to sleep.
Instead I slept bolt upright, my covers in a heap
around me on the sofa as a cough jarred me awake.
Sleeping upright on the sofa does not sweet dreaming make.
I longed for my soft bed and former slumbering meanders
through crisp rows of wheat stalks and banks of oleanders
in search of something still unknown, a peaceful all-night search
for those soulful comforts I never found at church.
My mother’s laughter once again, my father’s joking ways
waiting just around the bend of this nightly maze.
Instead, I’ve barely three hours sleep in between my wheezes—
my dreams propelled by cyclones instead of gentle breezes.
The cold germ is not neighborly. It visits when it pleases
and brings unwanted hostess gifts of drips and coughs and sneezes.
As you may have guessed, I’ve come down with a miserable cold. Two poems in one night, one while I was still trying to stay in bed, then another after I moved to sit upright on the couch which at least furnished a half hour of sleep now and then between the coughing bouts. The prompt today is meander.
