Tag Archives: Death

Abandoned

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Shack+Pump3.jpgPhoto Credit: D. Hammock

Abandoned 

Grass sways by the abandoned house
I cower inside––a trembling mouse
exposed to the bright flash of day
when all else has gone away.

First my father, then my mum
go away and never come
again to shelter, feed or love.
Life is a winging mourning dove

that makes us and then flies away,
making green grass into hay,
the flush of life and then decay,
a harsh light turning shadows gray.

Life swells  like paint–a curling blister.
It peels away my older sister,
then also takes my younger brother
and never comes to bring another.

A shadow passes over me.
A sparrowhawk. I dare not flee,
for life is mainly perilous.
It makes us just to feed on us.

Outside I see the preening cat.
It waits for me––patient and fat
in tall grass by the abandoned house
wherein I hide–a trembling mouse.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/abandoned/

Ashes and Dust and : NaPoWriMo 2016, Day 25 and “Whisper,” WordPress Daily Prompt

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“After all our years have settled like dust . . .”
                                           ––okc forgottenman

Ashes and Dust

When that cruel wind
blows against memories
that have settled like dust
on our lives,

what  will remain
sealed in our crevasses
––fine furniture that we are
of a bygone age?

What remaining minutes
of a long life of years
will define us then?
A kiss? A child held in arms?
Regrets? Terrors?

In those storerooms
where people  sit
stacked in silent cubicles,
what zephyrs whisper through
to stir the embers
of their minds?

Is there music in those currents
or are they the sad
whining winds
that curl over headstones
and lament the dust that settles there,

moaning through cracks in attics
and around hanging eaves troughs,
causing them to swing and bump
lonely against the fading
wood of abandoned houses?

LIfe builds us and wears us away
like the mountain.
Like sand on the beach.
We are not above it all.

No matter how much power
we think we gain,
Nature is a wind that breathes
into us at birth,
then blows itself away.

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem making use of the first line of someone else’s poem.  You can find the poem by okc forgottenman that I drew inspiration from Here. The WordPress prompt was “whisper.”

 

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-five-2/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/whisper/

 

What Consumed You: NaPoWriMo 2016, April 16

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What Consumed You

Hot wax for your wild boar sculpture
that you melted in my favorite sauté pan.
The metallic smell of your sweat.
Fine redwood shavings
caught in the curly hairs of your muscled arms.

“What is your favorite part of his body?”
a friend once asked––
a strange question.
It was your forearms.
You were a beautiful man.

“Nice legs,” a woman leaving a restaurant in St. Paul
once remarked to you, as we were entering.
“Bernice,” her husband expostulated.
“Well, they are,” she answered.
They were a bicyclist’s legs,
my second favorite part.

When they came to take you,
“What a waste––” I thought,
“that body consigned to flame––”
but appropriate to an artist
who had fired glass and clay and bronze
to join in the kiln all the beauty he had created from it.

When potter friends
asked for a cup of your ashes
for the glaze for your funereal urn,
that is how,
finally, you became
the art you lived for.

 IMG_5376The idea was to make ten of these seed-shaped urns to divide my husband Bob’s ashes into–one for each of Bob’s eight kids, his sister and me. A larger pea pod shaped tray was to enclose them all, but it blew into a hundred pieces in the kiln of our friends Dan and Laurie, who were making it.  I guess it was an appropriate metaphor, for Bob was the one who brought us all together and he was now gone.  Somehow, I wound up with eleven urns, so after Bob’s kids and sister came to Mexico to collect their ashes to distribute wherever they wished and we deposited the ashes designated to me in Lake Chapala, I wound up with one empty urn and one filled partially with the remains of Bob’s ashes.  I always thought the empty one was for me, but when I knocked over the one with Bob’s ashes in it a few years ago, we gathered him up so he now resides in my urn and I am unattached in the after life, at least for now.  The little urn in the foreground is all that is physically left of Bob.  In the background is a bronze nude that is one of hundreds of sculptures, art lamps and vases that he seeded the world with before he left it. R.I.P. Bob. Much of you remains in this world.

This is my poem for today’s prompt.  To see it and/or participate, go here: http://www.napowrimo.net/day-sixteen-3/

 

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/disaster/

Double Snap!

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Double Snap!

“Clap hands,” they said, “Clap hands
to the music,” and we all obeyed
that 50’s and 60’s band
that we might have followed anywhere–
out the door and across the street into the ocean
like geriatric children following a Pied Piper.

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As we had when the music was new,
we gyrated and sweated,
bumped hips, jitterbugged,
did swing and wild improvisation

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at Palapa Joe’s.
Joe himself barefoot at the keyboard,

a bookend to Denise at the drums.
And we? We are as hot
as this February night.

“Oh to be young again” is not in anyone’s vocabulary,
for we are teenagers again below the Tropic of Cancer.
In the ocean or in front of it,
sipping the sunset from tiny cobalt glasses,

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watching children move toy trucks down sandy roads
of their imagination

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and teenagers elfin in the surf.

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The sun falling falling farther northwards every day
until that March day we waited for every year when it sank
directly behind the offshore island.

Snap. It is gone.
Double snap. So are we.

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Here’s more of a photo story about Palapa Joe’s if you are interested:
 https://judydykstrabrown.com/2016/02/28/last-open-mike-of-the-season-at-palapa-joes/

The NaPoWriMo prompt was “double” and the WordPress prompt was “snap” so I combined them today…Here are links to those prompt sites in case you want to play along:
http://www.napowrimo.net/day-fifteen-2/
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/snap/

NaPoWriMo 2016, Day 9

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Today, we were challenged  to write a poem that includes a line that we are afraid to write. This is mine:

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Temporal

I am going to die.
That thing in me that talks to me
as well as the part who talks back
will be lost to posterity.
How sad that they have no names.

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-9/

September is the Cruelest Month–NaPoWriMo 2016, Day 4

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Riding in luxury on a sofa in the back of Denis’s pickup, seeing the beautiful Klamath country in style. We were driven directly under a rainbow that day, so it was on either side of us as we passed!      photo by Georgia Moriarty

September is the Cruelest Month

One cruel month is January, murdering December––
failed resolutions of last year we’re now forced to remember.

February rivals it for those with lovers missing––
conjuring up memories of  valentines and kissing.

March may come in cruelly–a lion or a ram,
but it is not the cruelest month. It goes out like a lamb.

April is the the month of rain and flowering and rhyme.
It cannot be the cruelest month. It is the most sublime.

May is not a cruel month, nor June, most surely not.
July and August are most kind––luxurious and hot.

September is the month for me that is the cruelest.
September is the month where I received my biggest test

in learning how to live alone after so many years,
conquering the loss of you. Battling my fears.

September was the month you left because you had to go––
away from planned adventures down a road you didn’t know.

Setting off alone–something you rarely did in life,
where you preferred to travel with a lover or a wife.

October found me no man’s wife, November found me gone
to take the road that we had planned. I would not be death’s pawn.

Then that December–– crueler than any month I’ll own.
That was the month I had the time to finally feel alone.

 

The prompt today was to write about “The cruelest month.”
http://www.napowrimo.net/day-four-4/

The Edge

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(If you are reading this poem in The Reader, please click on the title “The Edge” above to go to my page to read it as the Reader cancels out the line spacing  and this is a shape poem. )

The Edge

        Moving between
        the edges
        of my life,
         I have railed against sleep,
        not knowing how long
        the journey between them
        might be.

At three,
I rebelled against naps,
craving the daylight adventures
lost to them.

At sixty-eight,
I fight off sleep in the wee hours,
hoping to gain a little bit more time
in a life whose furthest rim I am approaching.
.

I needed my naps more than the other girls,
my mother always professed,
not knowing all the long nights I stayed awake even then,
trying to win back the time lost to them.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/edge/

Empty Studio

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Empty Studio

My memories
are footsteps
leading me to you.

I smell your scent of wood,
your sweat with the bouquet of bronze,
remember the finger you sacrificed
to impetuosity and art.

Finally the world fed all of you to the blade––
our severance as final as one of your straight sure cuts––
making you into memory I follow one step at a time,
my passing visible through stone dust
and wood shavings on the floor.

This is how you and I
create patterns
even after you are gone
from memories as fragmented
as what you left behind
when you created art––

stone chips, sawdust, pebbled glass,
curls of metal and winged shards of paper––
my footprints
pushing them farther apart
each time I pass through.
Leaving more of me
and less of you.

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https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/footsteps/

After Fifteen Years

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(If you are viewing this in the Reader, poem will not be formatted correctly.  Please click on the blog title above the photo to view this post from my blog where it will be in the correct shape.)

After 15 Years

Your memory                                                   cuts so sharply
through my dream’s beginning that I wake,
gasping like a fish on the sand
left by some fisherman
too intent upon his next catch
to end it cleanly.

In its tight skin,
I gasp for air,
rise as it cannot rise
and like you cannot rise
out to that night sea air
which is the only coolness
in a month of burned days.

My memory, curving round,
pulls in the memory of you
like gills seeking to understand
the waterless air.

Landed by some bigger fisherman
whose bait you couldn’t resist,
“Oh,” you said, just “Oh,”
before you took the hook,
slipping from my grasp
as I held on, held on,
let go.

Sweep (On the Death of David Bowie)

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Sweep
(On the Death of David Bowie)

Our world is clearing out around us,
swept by the broom of whatever moves things on.
Like dead leaves curling in their separate corners,
we miss the sweep this time,
but in our mind’s back edge
we imagine our ends—painful or quick,
alone or crowded with the vestiges of our life:
people, things, a cat curled over our feet to warm what can’t be warmed.
That broom leaning there against the corner has plans for us.
There is a world wanting to be filled up again
that needs clearing.

 

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/teen-age-idol/