Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

“Nomenculture”

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Illustration by Isidro Xilonzochitl for my book Sock Talk

“Nomenculture”

The names called across playgrounds in 1952
were “Lynn and Rita, Sharon, Karen, Sheila, Portia, Sue”.
But the kinds of names that mothers now choose for their daughters
are all names we never called out from our teeter-totters.

“Emma, Ava, Mia, Hannah, Isabella, Addison, 
Sophia and Olivia, Amelia and Madison,
Harper, Lily, Mia” are the sorts of names girls call
out to one another via texts or in the mall.

“Harper, Ella, Mia, Emily and Abigail”
are the names that girls today most commonly use to hail
each other on their smart phones via tweets or via text.
It’s hard to predict what may be the names that moms might next

choose to call their daughters.  Perhaps Venus, Saturn, Mars
will be the sort of names our daughters’ daughters call from cars.
Modern names for modern girls–– monikers so cool
that giving names like Betty, Pat or Judy would seem cruel.

Today, names must be Biblical or characters from Austen.
Or the names of cities from Madison to Boston.
“Judy” is a boring name, silly, old-fashioned, dull––
the sort of name that nowadays never makes the cull.

Those of my generation may seem rather out of date,
perhaps because of how we dress, our language or our weight.
Some women opt for face-lifts, saying wrinkles are to blame,
but I think it would be easier to simply change my name.


The Prompt: Say Your Name––Write about your first name: Are you named after someone or something? Are there any stories or associations attached to it? If you had the choice, would you rename yourself? https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/say-your-name/

Short and to the Point

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Short and to the Point

Eat to live or live to eat?
Chewing’s a thing that can’t be beat!

Eschewing chewing can’t be done,
for masticating’s just too fun.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/live-to-eat/

Blowing Her Own Horn

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The promptt: Critical Eye–Write about your blog as though you were a music critic.

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Blowing Her Own Horn

This blogger writes of this and that––
sometimes sharp and sometimes flat.
And though her phrasing is not stiff,
it’s usually devoid of riff.

Her instrument of choice? Her blog.
Her subjects? Modern life, her dog,
photography or 3-D art,
affairs of politics or heart.

World Music would be how I’d class it,
so when you find it, don’t just pass it.
Her themes are most original,
from Pop to Aboriginal.

Lyrics are her major thing––
meant to read instead of sing.
The critic’s lines that she most hates?
“This lady sure ain’t no Tom Waits!”

 

The Post: Critical Eye–Write about the subject you usually blog about as though you were a music critic.

She Reads Me!

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The Prompt: Your book is about to be recorded as an audiobook. If you could choose anyone  to narrate it, who would it be?

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She Reads Me!

When ever I go off to sleep
there is some company I keep.
No Teddy bear or other furry––
the thing I use to stave off worry
of that proverbial smoking gun–
the unkind deeds I might have done–
is a simple bedtime rite–
an audio book to stave off night.

Instead of wandering my mind,
mental ramblings of another kind
fill my thoughts before I slumber,
for fiction does less to encumber
my dreams with guilts of past misdeeds.
Entertainment rarely breeds
nightmares of a shocking sort.
The words of others just abort
somnambulant wanderings through the vast
savannas of my distant past.

So–short story long, if you’re the same––
using sleep to sort through blame
for all your guilty pleasures past,
and if you seek a way to cast
off all these worries of the night,
and choose my words to soothe your plight,
When I lay you down to sleep,
I hope I’m read by Meryl Streep.

Here’s what I wrote the first time I answered this prompt:   https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/09/11/3307/

 

TAKING THE LONG WAY HOME

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Taking the Long Way Home
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Class Reunion

Since we know where we are going so well,
let’s take the longest route there,
out past England’s Hill and that dip in the road we kids called lover’s leap.
Silly the traditions we tried to pretend––as though our histories weren’t long enough
to have attracted real ones. Now all of those old newnesses
are curling with age, discolored, cracking at the edges––
their roughness catching realities and dreams
and mixing them together so none of us
can remember the difference.

The Prompt: This Is Your Song–Take a line from a song that you love or connect with. Turn that line into the title of your post. (My song was “Long Way Home” by Tom Waits.)

The Go-between

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                                                       The Go-between

The Prompt: A Bird, a Plane, You!––You get to choose one superpower. Pick one of these, and explain your choice:

  • the ability to speak and understand any language
  • the ability to travel through time
  • the ability to make any two people agree with each other

I can’t think of any power greater than that of being able to make two people agree with each other.  Imagine its impact on negotiations between countries as well as with terrorist organizations such as Isis. The only problem would be the life I’d have to live to make use of those powers.  I would have to be a politician or lawyer in order to have access to people who can really make a worldwide difference, and with this power, I would be so effective that I doubt I’d have much of a personal life of my own as I’d always be traveling to solve one dispute or another.

On a personal level, to really enable people to see where those with opposing viewpoints are coming from would be of such immediate help that I can imagine being called in to mediate all sorts of disagreements between neighbors, friends and relatives. Messy divorces would be a thing of the past around me–either the divorce itself or the bickering over a settlement.  Schoolyard bullies might be better understood and quashed. Gang activity could be ameliorated. Donald Trump could be brought to his knees and silenced, hopefully.

World peace would be reason enough to sacrifice my other two major “wishes” of being able to time travel and speak any language in the world.  Guess I’ll have to save those wishes for the next inevitable repeat of this prompt.

 

No News Like Really New

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The Prompt: Roaring Laughter––What was the last thing that gave you a real, authentic, tearful, hearty belly laugh? Why was it so funny?

No News Like Really New

“We publish a new one each morning,” The Daily Prompt’s seen to declare,
speaking of topics they put on their page for all of their writers to share.
The prompt for this morning is “laughter” and the task will be simple for me,
for I’ve written to this prompt at least once before and it’s still here to easily see.

Yet still I write on for I cannot resist writing just one more poem on this topic
wherein I point out what you might only miss if your problem is that you’re myopic.
It’s true that they publish these prompts every day, & it’s true that it’s done in the morn;
but the rest makes us chortle and say to ourselves that the topic today’s slightly worn.

In two thousand fourteen on the seventh of July, I wrote on this topic before,
and if you count up from the bottom, my response is in row number four.
I think in this previous entry, I wrote about fun in the past
as though such riotous laughter was something not likely to last.

But now I recant and admit I was wrong. That poem I’m going to dis,
When I saw that they say that each prompt will be “new,” I burst a gut laughing at this!
WordPress we really do love you, and it’s true that your site’s working well,
but when you stop using the same worn out prompts is when you will truly excel.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/roaring-laughter/

Ritual

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No “cauldron boil and cauldron bubble” for me.  I’m too busy with a different sort of ritual.

Ritual

Up at eight, feed the dogs.
Back to bed to write some blogs.

Around noon, finally rise.
Open drapes, survey the skies.

It’s really time that I got uppa,
donned some clothes and had a cuppa.

Pull on Levis and a blouse,
Make my sojourn through my house.

Blend a smoothie, drink it down.
Get in my car and drive to town.

Do some shopping, have some lunch
or meet up with my writing bunch.

Go back home to meet my fate–
three dogs barking at my gate!

Throw Morrie’s ball, pat other dogs.
Go back inside and write more blogs.

Post more photos, read the Reader,
then to the garden to be a weeder.

Take some pictures of some blooms.
(Cee’s daily flower posting looms.)

Post the picture, read blogs of others:
Serendipity’s and Mother’s.

Go out to dinner or to dance,
then home to have another chance

to catch up on the blogs I’ve missed––
To see if I’ve been “liked “ or dissed.

By now you’re probably all agog
at how my ritual’s mostly blog!!

 

The Prompt: Just Another Day–Our days our organized around numerous small actions we repeat over and over. What’s your favorite daily ritual?

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/just-another-day/

Pushing and Shoving: Favorite Quotation

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Pushing and Shoving

“If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

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I’m trying to set up for the art walk this weekend, but it is tricky when you are away from home without the usual display materials. I did a photo shoot this morning, but all of the photos mysteriously disappeared after I edited them. Hmmm. This is a quick shot of a display of retablos set up in the bedroom. I need to avail myself of all available surfaces!

I envy people who can throw things together with great flair, but I’m not one of them.  I need to experiment, nudge things around, walk away and come back and have another look, leave the room and walk back in to surprise myself and see if I really like it, seeing it as a stranger of sorts.

When my friend Patty had me come help her arrange things in her new house after her old house blew away in a tornado, she said, “I’m going to have to leave the room while you finish. It drives me crazy watching you fuss!” Ha!!!  I always think of this every time I am pushing things this way and that.

I blame this on my mother.  From the time I was little, we would wait until my dad went to bed and then rearrange the living room furniture.  We’d sit with our backs against big heavy pieces like the piano and push with our legs and backs against the heavy beast to budge it without risking popping a muscle or tendon.  Then we’d sit and survey our work, move one thing or another.  I think my mom in this way made me a collage artist before I even knew the meaning of the word.  It was performance art where we could actually walk around in the assemblage and tug it around.

When I work in the art studio, I usually work on 12 to 20 pieces at a time.  I arrange them, then come back the next day and take out one thing, add another.  Pieces can take a week to come out right or a year–or, after a year I sometimes take them all apart and start over.  I don’t know why a piece finally feels right.  I just know when it does.

Yes, when it comes to art, decorating or setting a table–I think “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

The same goes for cooking!  If it doesn’t taste right, I just start adding things until it tastes right.  I like lots of flavor in a dish.  Subtle just doesn’t do it for me in either decorating or cooking.

The Prompt:  Do you have a favorite quote?  Tell us what significance it has for you.

How to Write a Blog with Bite!

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How to Write a Blog with Bite!

Have you ever had a hot dog without mustard, onions, relish?
What is a hot dog, after all, but something to embellish?
The same is true of blogging. It has to have some spice––
an interesting title is my opening advice.
Remember your first sentence should invite us in.
An opening poorly stated? The worst blogging sin.
Don’t start you blog apologizing you have naught to say.
If you have nothing for us?  Just don’t write today.
Make your first line snappy, original and clear.
Don’t show your indecision, for you’re the expert here!!!
Nobody else can possibly know where you’re going to go
if you write about a topic where you are in the know.
Hook them with your opening–confident or funny.
Your readers are the buzzing flies. Give them a little honey!
Start right in with your topic with no wandering around.
We shouldn’t have to search for where the real message is found.
A blog is like a fine-tooled belt that you have carved from leather––
not just a pile of sentences that you have heaped together.
Do not use tired comparisons that you have heard before.
Each sentence that you write should be like opening a door
and finding yourself in a world that’s fresh and new and bright.
And then you’ll have a hot dog blog that we will want to bite!!!


Here are some links to just a few of the exceptional blogs that never give short shrift.  Read them every day and their excellence will pull you along with them. Set your standards high and you will soon have a readership that will make you want to excel,  just to keep them happy!! (photo is a stock photo from shutterstock.)

https://redswrap.wordpress.com/2016/01/03/the-old-days-of-big-wine/

https://alotfromlydia.wordpress.com/

http://teepee12.com/

https://momshieb.wordpress.com/

okcforgottenman.wordpress.com

https://ourrumblingocean.wordpress.com/

https://yournibblednews.wordpress.com

https://helenmeikle.wordpress.com/

http://thegadabouttown.com/

 

 The Prompt: What’s the key advice you would give to new bloggers:?