Behaving French
Today I find it suitable
to practice my inscrutable.
It’s part of my act femme fatale
that men can’t fathom me at all.
They’re wiles my mother taught to me
back when I was only three,
and I admit it’s served me well
putting bon vivants through hell.
When situations new astound me,
I wrap my femme fatale around me.
I use it everywhere I go,
’cause it’s the only French I know!
The prompt today is inscrutable.
Dark Against Light
The universe’s fine maquette
is light on dark and dry on wet—
her quietness and stillness set
against the thrum of castanet.
It is a sort of etiquette:
opposite versus opposite.
Victory gauged against regret.
Sunrise followed by sunset.
Every lottery and bet
boundless riches as well as debt.
It does no good to fuss and fret.
This irony is all we get—
nature one pure brightness set
as backdrop to our silhouette.
Want more views of this sunset? Go HERE.
The prompt today is one of the prettiest words in the English language: silhouette.
Click on any photo to enlarge all. jdbphotos
Trilling
Don’t you hear the mockingbird
trilling out the whole absurd
story of the passing year,
giving voice to shock and fear?
Listen to the mourning dove,
warning us from far above,
the starlings, wrens and birds of prey.
Our debts all nature has to pay.
How can it be that those in power
sit and ponder and yet cower,
too intent on their own needs
to enact necessary deeds
to bring a tyrant fool to task—
to do what all the sane men ask?
Shame on these godly well-heeled men
who fold their hands and say amen,
but let sick children go untreated,
tenements to go unheated,
our waterways to be polluted,
laws and edicts instituted
that benefit the filthy rich
to raise themselves another niche
while milling masses unenlightened
vote heedless as their belts are tightened,
favoring the autocrats
in fear of what the democrats
“might” do, when all around them all
democracy proceeds to fall.
Hear her there, up on the limb,
surveying all who follow him?
Simple nature mocking us?
Laughing at our furious fuss?
Perhaps more knowing than we know
when raging fires and piles of snow
assault us, it is nature’s way
to lead us and to have its say.
We cannot think of only our
needs and exercise our power
for special interests without paying.
This is what all of nature’s saying.
Mudslides, hurricanes and drought
may show us what it’s all about.
Balance, sanity and sharing
fairness, ecology and caring
will bring about a world that’s lasting
beyond our legislature’s casting.
God-fearing men, do you care
about how your children fare?
And as those whom we’ve elected,
oh so naïvely selected
pad their pockets and close their eyes,
our world around us swiftly dies.
Those are the truths clearly absurd
told to us by the mockingbird.
He sits above on swaying limb.
Why are the masses deaf to him?
The prompt today is trill.
Happy Ending
He was a follower, a grunt
who married a lass dominant.
She led, he followed in their dance.
He wore an apron, she the pants.
It was a perfect unity
if folks had only let them be;
but, alas, the other blokes
had to make the usual jokes.
They called him pussy-whipped and meek—
berated him as timid, weak—
and so, simply to please his mates,
to end their jeering cruel debates,
he went against his true love’s wishes
and refused to do the dishes.
The facts, there’s no need to imbue.
Both words and dinner plates, they flew.
He could not match her swift invective
of ways in which he was defective,
and so he simply stood and waited
until her fury was abated,
then asked this cyclone he had wed
if she would like to go to bed.
Their skirmish ended in romance.
He shed his apron, she her pants.
A worn-out lover well-behooves
a meeker husband in his moves,
and nothing like a little tiff
to make a timid fellow stiff.
Now that her angst had flared and passed,
he got to be on top, at last.
The prompt today is dominant.
When I contacted the tech help at WordPress this morning at 10:00, telling them the prompt word had not been published yet even though it is usually posted promptly at 8, was it intentional irony or serendipity that the prompt word turned out to be “tardy?”
The prompt today was tardy–in more ways than one!!! As was my link to it. I didn’t realize until 5:30 this afternoon that I was tardy as well, not in writing the post, but in linking it. Thanks, forgottenman, for pointing this out! Something in the air today, I guess.
Double Betrayal
Her thoughts in parting were most candid,
her emotions, clearly branded
on her face. They reprimanded
him for how he cruelly stranded
her within their love affair—
how he left her standing there
alone, heartbroken, vulnerable.
How he’d burst her true love’s bubble.
Thus was her earlier promise broken
before a single word was spoken
when she met them, face to face,
engaged in intimate embrace—
that one who was to be her mister
with her faithless younger sister.
The prompt today is candid.
Listless
I don’t have any strategy, I don’t have any plan—
no recipes for muffins, no plots to meet a man.
My life is so unstructured that I have nary a list.
With no clearcut tomorrow, my future’s in a mist.
If I were only twenty, I guess they’d call me fickle.
To be so directionless would land me in a pickle.
At seventy I’ve joined the list of lives that are expired.
I’m finally giving up and saying I’m fully retired!
My alarm clock’s in the cupboard––abandoned. I don’t need it.
I gifted this year’s calendar to someone who will heed it.
No meetings on my calendar. No notes upon my fridge.
I don’t attend aerobics. I gave up playing bridge.
How do I fill my life out now that I’ve come unwired?
Now that it’s gone unplotted and its furnace gone unfired?
I’m letting every day I meet just unwind and unravel.
Letting fate determine what pathway I will travel.
My compass needle disengaged, I’m floundering in “free—”
All things now determined by serendipity.
The prompt today is strategy.
Near Horizons
You have your own horizon, and my dear, I have mine;
but whatever journeys we take towards our decline,
no matter how we see our end—that final box of pine—
I do not want my journey to be a narrow line.
There are so many hills to climb before that last recline.
A few surprises would be good. Adventures would be fine.
I have a few more lives to live before that number nine!
And when it comes––that time when I must meet with the divine,
it will do no good to fight it—to struggle or to whine.
I hope that it comes quickly as I lie supine.
The prompt today is horizon.
Click on first photo to enlarge all.
Clothes Make the Man but Women Make the Clothes
In matters of both clothes and hair
we profit from the use of flair.
A scarf, a pin, a tilted hat
reveal that we are more than what
we choose to put upon our heads
or bodies, for our hats or threads
too often conceal form or hair,
not showing what is under there.
Sometimes it’s an improvement, true:
our hair dyed an unfortunate hue
or bodies altered by midnight trips
kitchenward that spread our hips.
This gown I wear is brilliant red,
It spreads around me in my bed—
ankle-length and numinous,
free-flowing and voluminous .
I obscure my trunk and limbs in it.
My zaftig form just swims in it.
It makes me feel petite and small.
Inside, I’m hardly there at all!
When I awaken, I’m not alert,
throw off the covers, unwind the skirt
from where it’s twisted round my legs,
I yawn and blink to expunge the dregs
of sleep from everywhere it tries
to prolong my dreams and clot my eyes.
It’s in the bathroom where I see
I’ve made this gown uniquely me.
My reflection in the bathroom glass
shows its brilliant red en masse.
Its designer’s plan I clearly flout,
for I wear it inside out.
Want more hats? Look HERE.
Again, I’ve gone shopping in my poetry closet. This one repeated from three years ago. The prompt today is blink.
Blink
I don’t really need ESP to know what you are thinking,
for when I ask, “Should I wear this?” your left eyelid starts blinking
like it does whenever you tell a little fib;
and I can tell your “It looks great!” sounds a little glib.
That’s how I know without a doubt you’re spinning a fine yarn;
and that, in fact, in this dress I must look wide as a barn.
If you say this dish is great but feed most to the dogs—
if you say I’m clever but you rarely read my blogs—
if you “want” to get together but we rarely do—
I’ve already read the clues to ascertain your view.
Yet, still I have the option to see the other side
and find a way to look at it that will preserve my pride.
Your eye might blink because a gnat got caught in it just now,
and so I do not really look as broad as any cow.
He just has a small appetite. Her eyesight might be failing.
She might be out of town and when she gets home from her sailing,
she’ll call me up and we will meet and have a laugh or two.
Without this ESP I really get to choose my view
of believing what I want to in spite of what I’ve guessed.
When it comes to friendship, less clarity is best!
Not many of you were around four years ago when I first wrote this poem so here it is again, out for review. The daily prompt word is blink.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 