Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

Small Fry

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Small Fry

We were small fry in a grown up world,
our dresses starched, our hair tight-curled
on a candlestick by mothers
who scrubbed the faces of small brothers
with fingers they had spit upon
to purge the dirt they’d lit upon.

We had no choice in any of this.
Nor in the neighbor lady’s kiss.
Sour and moldy though she might smell,
we pretended we loved it well.
So went the life in days gone by
so long as you were just small fry.

Now children pose for selfies and diss
the thought of an old lady’s kiss.
They refuse to  run through traces.
Don’t allow spit-scrubbed-at faces.
Skirts go unstarched, hair goes uncurled
now that children rule the world!

Fry is the WP prompt today.

When to Laugh

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When to Laugh

Some jokes make me chuckle and others make me laugh,
but others are not funny, and their telling a mere gaffe.
Do not joke about my weight, friends. Do not make fun of my age,
for instead of prompting chortles, it will just occasion rage.
Do not tell me racial jokes or laugh at the infirm.
Cruelty’s an illness and jokes like this its germ.

We all know the subjects to avoid when telling jokes,
but we also know those insensitive crude blokes
who think they are so clever in breaking all the rules
and thereby are the jokes themselves, just proving they’re the fools.
Forgive me if the thing about them that might prompt my chuckles
is when other listeners respond to them with knuckles!

More about chuckling here: https://judydykstrabrown.com/category/laughter/

The prompt word today is “chuckle.”

New Foal

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IMG_9512 (1)jdbphoto 2016

New Foal

From his mother’s teat, the new-born colt
raised his head with a sudden jolt,
his new world noisier than before
as the truck drove up with its engine roar.
A small boy sat with his window down,
surveying the scene with a subtle frown
as the older man jumped out to walk
slowly toward him, lest he balk,
and reached a hand to touch his coat,
fingers exploring, as though by rote,
feeling bones, sinew and muscle.

“This one here will have some hustle,”
he said to the boy who stood beside,
thinking of his horse who’d died.
“You want to name him?” his father said.
The boy’s toe shuffled. He hung his head.
The tiny colt looked up and snorted—
edgy now, but well-deported.
He moved to the boy to butt his arm.
His nose was soft and smooth and warm
as it nudged the small boy’s skin.
His father watched the pact begin.

 

I saw this unusual colt alongside the road almost a year ago.  I pulled off as soon as possible to snap a few shots and have been waiting for a chance to use them  Not exactly a new-born colt, but close.  I’ve been waiting long enough!

The prompt today is “jolt.”

Parental Restraints

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(Decision by the parents of Geoffrey Winthrop Young (25 October 1876 – 8 September 1958), a British climber, poet and educator, and author of several notable books on mountaineering, who asked to go climbing, promising he’d write the poem assigned by his teacher the minute he got home.)

Parental Restraints

He won’t be doing any climbing
until he finishes his rhyming!

 

The WordPress prompt today was “climbing.”

Regional Differences

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Regional Differences

They joked about their names. His name was Johnnie, she was Frankie.
It’s true that she was beautiful, he handsome, tall and lanky.
He was a genteel southern boy, while she was born a yankee.
Every time she looked at him, her heart went a bit wanky,
but the slowness of his courtship rites was making her most cranky.
For though she appeared shy, at heart she was a trifle skanky.
As he contemplated holding hands, she dreamed of hanky panky!

 

 

The prompt word today is cranky.

Futile Obsession

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Isn’t much chocolate ice cream left, so he may as well polish it off.

 

Futile Obsession

Measure for measure, pound for pound,
on our figures we must expound.
What diet is in fashion today?
What inches lost? What do I weigh?
I must admit, I, too, obsess.
This subject causes much distress.
Once zippers work with ease, it’s true,
the first thing that I tend to do
is buy a quart of chocolate
ice cream and then devour the lot!

Hungry for more ice cream? Look here:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/02/02/a-cone-to-die-for/
or here:

Lick for Lick


The DP prompt today is measure.

The Perfect Squelch: Spare Tire

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Remember when the Saturday Evening Post had a feature entitled “The Perfect Squelch” that featured a different perfect comeback every issue?  Well, then, you must be as old as I am.

 

Spare Tire

My blind date worked out most sublimely.
First of all, it was most timely,
for my ex had told me he
would be there with another she.
I waltzed in regally well-armed
with date both handsome, rich and charmed.
His tux immaculate, his dental
work just out-shined by his mental
acumen. He quoted Proust!
So when my ex came up to roost
on a chair next to the mirror where
I was perusing my form and hair
and said we made a lovely pair;
I answered, “Him? He’s just a spare.”
He poked my middle, then tweaked my nose.
“Well then, when your spare tire blows,
they’ll come in handy, all those guys.
Or, you could simply exercise.”

 

 

“Timely” is the prompt word today.

Untold Stories

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Untold Stories

When her death left us all behind,
so many questions came to mind.
Why couldn’t I have asked them when
she could have answered, way back then?
What she told voluntarily,
about her life and family tree
was always very carefully chosen—
the details all rehearsed and frozen.

The same stories she told over again
about the things that once had been,
but so many things she didn’t say,
afraid, perhaps, she might display
sad facts of life she always hid—
the underside that she forbid.
We would laugh and joke and kid.
Unpleasantness we never did.

She was a good mother. Supportive, kind,
always helpful in a bind.
Generous and always there.
Full of loving, thoughtful care—
that same care that I tried to show her,
although, I fear, I did not know her.
That little girl who lost her dad
and favorite sister.  Was she sad?

Mom never talked of it so we
simply let the subject be.
The stepfather she didn’t care for—
what were the details and the wherefore?
How did it feel to give her hand
to a stranger, then to move to land
so bare and rolling with grass like seas,
empty of people and of trees?

Was she lonely? Did she have friends?
How did they come to make amends
the time she left my father and
took my sister by the hand
and went on home, angry and bitter.
Did my father come to get her?
All these family stories bold
were hinted at but never told.

My mother’s foolish Southern pride
would not permit the underside
of life to show. She tucked it in—
to display unhappiness was sin.
To please her, we followed the rules.
Joking and kidding were the tools
we used to hide unpleasantness
and thereby circumvent the mess

of sadness and humiliation.
Easier to show elation.
We told our secrets to friends, but we
withheld them from our family.
What stories took they to the grave,
my parents, generous and brave?
All those things they thought to spare us
come about to greet and stare us

in the eye on occasions when
we reminisce about back then.
“I  wonder what?” is perpetually
my thought about my family.
With parents gone, I don’t know how
we’ll ever know the answers now.
And because I barely knew my mother,
I am still looking for another.

 

 

The Day 10 NaPoWriMo prompt—yes, two days late—was to write a poem that is a portrait of someone important to you. The WordPress prompt was “pleased.”

Work Week

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IMG_3604Work Week

Monday

The day’s become unravelled. The night’s begun to fall,
yet I’ve not accomplished anything. I’ve done nothing at all
except cooking a curry and writing several drafts
of poems still uncompleted–they’re bobbing here like rafts
afloat upon my consciousness but have nowhere to go.
The words all came so quickly, but their gelling has come slow.
They want to group together in concrete communities,
but instead they’re fluttering like moths and landing where they please.

Tuesday

I’m a syllable collector, a hoarder of each word
without a purpose for them. It’s come to be absurd.
Verbs are piled up on shelves, adjectives under foot.
The gerunds hang like spiderwebs. I have no place to put
The adverbs and the articles. They leak out of my head.
When I nudge them into lumpy piles, they hide beneath the bed.
I’m going to have a housecleaning of consonants and vowels.
Collect them up in buckets and wipe them up with towels.

Wednesday

I’ll sort out all the lovely words. The ones I like, I’ll hoard,
then pile the others in tidy stacks and tie them up in cord.
I’ll keep the good ones by my desk to sort through when they’re needed.
Bad words go in the basement, unsorted and unheeded.
Then I’ll have a yard sale of unused words like “pickle”
and sell them in unsorted lots—a handful for a nickel.
Then perhaps I can make room for words more orderly
that come to me in sentences that make more sense to me.

Thursday

My muse is hyperactive, I need to tame her down.
Instead of resting close to me, she runs all over town
collecting words at random— funky words like “phat”—
so when I really need her, I don’t know where she’s at.
Then when I am sleeping, she unloads word after word
until there’s no room left for them. It has become absurd.
They’re piling up around me. They’ve reached my nose and ear.
I cannot swim my way through them. I’m smothering, I fear.

Friday

That’s why I’m calling poets, every novelist or bard
to have a drive-by of my house and stop here at my yard.
Bring a bucket and a rake. Take all the words you please,
for now they’re raining down like leaves falling from my trees.
Just gather them in armloads. I won’t find it queer. 
Better bring a wheelbarrow if you cannot park near.
You do not need to pay for them. Today they’re yours for free.
If you don’t help I fear that words will be the end of me!

Saturday

YARD SALE
Take what you wish. Please do not disturb occupant.

 

P.S. If you’d like to take any words or phrases or lines from this poem to prompt your own poem, please do.  But please, please send your poem as a comment here–or send a link.

The prompt today was unravel. The link to NaPoWriMo Day 11 is HERE.

Blind Misfortune

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DSC08409Mixed Media collage “Macho” by Judy Dykstra-Brown, jdbphoto


Blind Misfortune

What you blindly get into
in youth can be the end of you.
Those days of passion, counting coup
are never risked when days are few.
The shorter our remaining years,
the greater seem to be our fears.
Thus, old men send the young to war,
forgetting what life’s really for.

They forget love’s throb and ache
and living just for living’s sake––
that need to feel adventure’s thrust––
the drive to do what’s fair and just.
Once passion ebbs, the quest for gold
drives these men turned crass and old.
They give libido other names
as they turn to other games.

Warheads coming now erect,
it seems a waste not to connect
them to their targets, so far away.
It’s only strangers who will pay.
All those enemies of mind,
with no thought of age or kind:
mothers and children meet their ends
and old men never make amends.

They send their own youth off to war
because this is what they’re for.
And young men taught by fantasy
on football field or on TV
are fodder for the greed of those
billionaires in evening clothes.
So the young men blindly go
for reasons that they barely know.

The WordPress prompt word today is blindly.