Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

“The First Day of School” for dVerse Poets

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What demands a list more than deciding what to put in your book bag for the firt day of school..and what is more necessary than a list in relating the story of that big day?

First Day of School

In our house, a pencil sharpener fastened to a shelf
with a little handle I could turn myself.
All the curls of wood and lead safely caught within,
as I gave the pencil sharpener one more little spin.

Five newly sharpened pencils, clutched tight in my hand,
then bound into a secure bunch with a rubber band.
Dropped into my school bag with eraser, tablet, ruler.
Everything unused and clean.  Nothing could be cooler.

The school warning bell rings out as my saddle shoe––
crisp black and white, unblemished, for it’s stiffly new––
makes its first step out my door to cross across the street
and with other six-year-olds, to find my proper seat.

Lynnie, Henrietta, Sheila, Diane, Sharon.
Clevie,  Meridee and I, Rita, Linda, Karen.
Lyle, Keith, Clinton, Jeff, Georgie, Jimmie, Billie––
come from all directions, running willie-nillie

to get to school before the bell sounds its final peal.
All those years of playing school finally here for real.
We stand in lines inside the room as she calls our names.
No more days of playing random childhood games.

Reading and arithmetic, that little cardboard store
where we learned to count out change, make shopping lists and more.
Spelldowns standing up in front, facing towards the class.
Your hand up when you had to ask for the bathroom pass.

Marching all around the room singing “Charming Billy.”
Can he bake a cherry pie? Those lyrics were so silly.
Then we stomped and pointed–our volume without match
as we sent the boys out yonder  to the paw paw patch.

Are you too young to remember? Or is it that you’re old,
your remembrances supplanted, your memories grown cold?
Do you not recall  the ink wells and chalk erasers?
The recess bell, the sandbox, the swingers and the chasers?

The teeter-totters creaking and the merry-go-round?
Every playground adventure? That cacophonous sound
of shouts and jeers and teasings, the tether ball and slide.
All the joyous sounds before we were called inside

to spend time with Alice and Jerry,  and with “Run, Spot, run,”
reading words over and over before the day was done?
They swirled around in all our brains––phonics, words and numbers
stirred our active childhood minds from their former slumbers.

It was so many years ago that we set out that day
upon a road that later would carry us away
from that square white building with its tower and tolling bell
that for the first eight years of school we would mind so well.

Streaming in from all the sides of our little town––
brilliant students, dunces, class bully and class clown.
It was a collaboration that ultimately made
eighteen little boys and girls ready for second grade!

The dVerse Poets prompt was to construct a list poem.

“African Love Story” for dVerse Poets

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African Love Story

In this day and age
Almost everyone has a tropical love story.

Show of hands–
How many here?

There was a war.  Danger.
And there were disapproving fathers
And careers.
And yes, I know that some
Love stories survive them all.
But ours didn’t.
And he didn’t.

So just for a year and a few months
We were in love in a warm climate.
A torn love story with a sad ending
With me as its only living remnant.

Imagine yourself
In that story
Full of hormones and atmosphere

It is a meditation remembering
Sand and moonlight under the Southern Cross.
Or cocks crowing before you fell asleep
Long rolling nights in a village
Where almost no one spoke your language.

Perhaps you were a prisoner of love
As I was years ago.
Non-protesting, dizzy and dumb for passion.

Would I have stayed for love if I’d known
It was the whole business of love I’d leave behind,
And not just my beloved?

Would you?

 

 

The dVerse prompt is ‘Where Does Love Go?”

A Reunion Imperative for dVerse Poets

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Upon Running into a Former Best Friend

Don’t give me cause to regret our reunion.
Don’t bring back to mind our former disunion.
Don’t lament my career or cuss at my kids—
those actions that once put us into the skids—
dissolving our friendship and our former ties
when I’d had enough of your conniving lies.
Don’t inveigle or bemoan your lack of a pension.
Past times I’ve come through I won’t bother to mention.
And if you’ve a reaction and want to explode,
do me a favor. Take it on the road!!!

For dVerse Poets...an Imperative Poem

Just Me for dVerse Poets

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Just Me
Inside my skin, around my bone,
I am me and me alone.
Wherever I choose to abide,
it is just me tucked here inside.
And if you find you’re in a bind,
you’re welcome to explore my mind
and pass on anything you find.

For the dVerse Poets Quadrille challenge, the prompt is “Bone.” Illustration created with AI. (Best I could do.)

Letter from the People of America for dVerse Poets

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Letter from the People of America

Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dear Elected Representatives:
(A Letter from the People of America)

We ventilate our dwellings of many different kinds,
but may not have the sense to ventilate our minds.
Perhaps we fear we’d stir up something that has died—
some milk of human kindness that’s buried deep inside.

As kids sit scared in cages and countless forests burn,
you think you’re given license to hoard all that you earn,
protecting it from others who have need of it,
flailing around in luxuries of your money pit.

Yachts and cars and mansions should not buy peace of mind
when they leave our planet in a lethal bind.
Our plastic world is flailing. It chokes on its excess.
How can you turn your backs on its extreme duress?

We elect our rulers. They are not born to reign.
In return we must demand that they share our pain
and do not profit by it with cash for legislation
leading to their betterment and our consternation.

Look at where we’re going and look at where we’ve been.
Open up your minds. Let truth and justice in.
During your term of office who’s advanced as far as you have?
It seems the teeming masses did not profit as a few have.

We’re taking back our government, abolishing each clause
that gives you the entitlement to profit from the laws
you enact for self-interest. It’s time that you were outed
and all who vote against our interests were routed.

You defend bad judgement, support your corrupt clown.
Now all who stand behind him must also be brought down.
You overlook the obvious for motives all your own.
You’ve opened up the cage and the dove of peace has flown,

stalked by a bald eagle who feeds on those for whom
it should serve as symbol of something else but doom.
We must bring back our liberty, nobility and pride.
Resuscitate a country that many fear has died.

The truth is there before you, so open up your minds
to see there’s a solution for our present binds.
If you refuse to topple that one on whom you dote,
we’ll topple you one after one–when we go to vote!!

For dVerse Poets we are to write a poem in the form of a letter.

Memories of Bob for dVerse Poets Acrostic Challenge

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Bob Brown sculpture and visitor

Memories of Bob
(Judy Dykstra-Brown Acrostic Poem)

Just as I was about to give in to distress,
up came a memory of you,
diverted by all those dreams
you carried in your head.

Dreams consisting of wood, metal, paper, stone––
your first loves
katapulting themselves into your art.
Sculptures startling in their originality,
taking their viewers into new worlds,
returning, eventually, to
actual life, and me.

Beautiful memories
return daily, now that you are gone.
Over the years, I see you daily, nonetheless,
when I see what you created––
now the only part of you that remains.

 

For dVerse Poets the task is to write an acrostic poem for the name of a famous person, loved one or yourself. I used my own name, Judy Dykstra, which after marriage included my husband’s last name as well, blending us, as does this poem. I hope.

Dakota Dirt for dVerse Poets

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Dakota Dirt

 

Dakota Dirt

My father toiled for fifty years,
facing the worries and the fears—
the gambles that a farmer faced
when all his future he had placed
as seeds beneath Dakota dirt.
Every year, he risked the shirt
right off his back. With faith, he’d bury
his whole future in that prairie.
Sticky gumbo, that fine-grained silt
upon which his whole life was built.
Then, closer to our summer home,
near the river, in sand and loam,
he hoped he could prepare for ours:
our clothes, our college, and first cars.

Then came those years that brought the change
that altered fields and crops and range.
The rain that formerly turned to rust
plows left untended, turned to dust
that, caught up in the wind’s mad thrust
caused many a farmer to go bust
as a whole nation mourned and cussed
black clouds of dirt that broke the trust
that nature would provide for all.
What formerly fed, now brought their fall.

It broke the men who couldn’t wait
for the drought years to abate,
but my father kept his faith in soil.
Found other paying forms of toil
building dams to catch what rain
might later fall on that dry plain.
And though others thought his prospects poor,
he kept his land and bought some more.
He learned to vary furrow line,
believing it would turn out fine.

So when good fortune returned again,
bringing with it snow and rain,
he welcomed and was ready for it.
That April it began to pour, it
filled his dams and nourished what
soil remained. He filled each rut
with clover, alfalfa and wheat.
Allowed the summer sun to beat
and change them into fields of gold—
into grain and feed he sold.

Bought cattle. Planted winter wheat.
Once more secure on his two feet,
expanded and as he had planned,
bought more cattle and more land.
Some said that he had just exploited
those whose land he’d reconnoitered
and purchased after they’d given up,
empty hands transformed to cup.
He was a hero unsung, unknown,
until long after when I was grown.

At the centennial of our town,
I learned a bit of his renown
when others told to me how he
shared nature’s generosity.
He sent three daughters to university,
then shared with his community 
to build a church and give more knowledge
to those young men he sent to college.
Then made loans without fame or thanks
to other farmers denied by banks.

I’d always known how rich my life
was made by all his toil and strife—
the insurance he gave his family
that enabled us all to be free.
But, aside from daughters, wife and mother,
I’d never know of every other
soul he’d helped  to prosperous ends:
neighboring ranchers, sons of friends.
Could my father have known he’d also planned
all these other futures when he bought the land?

This rich Jones County gumbo on the treads of my tire at one of our all-town reunions a few years ago is what sent me to college!

For dVerse Poets “Embodying a Landscape” prompt.

Bird Chorus, No Backup, for dVerse Poets

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Bird Chorus, No Backup

Birds perch on countless branches, each a separate bell
ringing out the cadence of stories they must tell.
Around them, eerie silence, for no other sounds compete.
No sound of children’s laughter. No pattering of feet.
Compared to their iPhones, mere nature can’t compete.

 

The prompt for the dVerse Poets Quadrille prompt is “bird.”  A Quadrille asks for 44 words only…

My Father in Me for dVerse Poets

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My Father in Me

After those first two dreams, you never returned again, Dad. So now, more than 50 years after your death, I am instead looking for you within myself. I find you every time I retell an often-told tale adding embellishments as you did, or in my obsession with other people’s babies and that yearning to hold every one I see. I remember your holding the babies of tourists in Mack’s Cafe or Ferns “so their folks could finish their meals.” You loved the tiny ones most. As you explained it, “I like them mewling and puking in my arms!”

I recall all the abandoned baby animals you brought into our lives: a mole, a magpie, numerous baby rabbits, once a puppy held up in a cattle sales ring and tossed up to you in the third row, tiny yellow kittens and the best of all–Zippy, the tiny raccoon found in its nest after hunters killed its mother.

So it is you I see in me as I remember the wild cat from the redwoods shyly watching, then lured by food, who moved into my jewelry studio and gave birth, leaving us with three tiny blue Burmese kittens. And I count on my fingers eleven different puppies and six kittens  adopted in the past 25 years since moving to Mexico–found in the street, by the lake, dumped in a cardboard box beside my garage.  Is it you, father, delivering these tiny lost ones to me, knowing the you in me that has as much need of them as they have of me?

It was my father
guiding the wild cat to me,
three kittens within.

Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.

South Dakota 1954. Zippy, our pet raccoon
Boulder Creek, CA 1987, our little kittens from the redwood forest
Mexico, 2002.Annie, my second kitten adopted in Mexico, in her favorite place. She was adopted a year or so after after Talulah, whom I had found in a basket of scarves in a shop in Tonala that she had streaked into a minute before I walked in. The owner, whose daughter was allergic, begged me to adopted her and guess what?
Mexico, 2002, Lulu teaching Annie how to climb the screen door.
After finding homes for five puppies found on the beach after the death of their mother, I found Frida trotting toward us on the busy highway. At first I thought she was a big rat. Cars were speeding by. Of course, she came home with me.
First there was Frida, then Diego.
For the fifteen or more years Frida lived with me, this is where she was most of the time, checking out the neighborhood and occasionally barking at someone who didn’t belong there.
Then Morrie, abandoned by a houseguest, joined the menagerie..
Morrie got the closet door open and attacked 36 rolls of toilet paper!!!
One day I came out to find this tiny kitten standing up to Annie to steal her meal. I opened the garage door to find two more climbing the bougainville vine and another in a box.
Since I’d fed a number of stray cats over the years, it may be that the mother cat brought these kittens to my house hoping I’d feed them as I’d fed her a few times, but the presence of this box makes me think someone dropped them off.
Ollie, runt of the litter of 4.
And so, four more kittens to join my adult cat Annie.
When Frida died, I had a sculpture of her installed on the roof dome.
And Frida’s ashes went into this effigy which we concreted in place on her favorite place on the dome, to watch for as long as I have any say in the matter.
These things are never really planned, but shortly after Frida’s death, I found Zoë on a beach north of La Manzanilla.This was the first time I ever held Zoe.
And strangely enought, Ollie, once runt of the litter and now the largest and only male cat, became Zoë’s Mom.
At home, the older dogs and Zoe are not exactly siblings yet.
Then sadly, Diego passed away and the day after, I was introduced to Coco, rescued from the streets of Guadalajara, and you might not be surprised to discover she joined our family. I was egged on to adopt her by my visiting nephew and his friend.
And the terrible duo was begun!!!
As new real puppies joined the family, I installed a gate to keep less experienced little feet off the dome, but inevitably, guests or Pasiano would leave the gate on the stairs up to the casita whose terrace adjoined the dome.
Neighbors snapped this photo, then called to advise me that Frida had visitors.

For dVerse Poets

Advice to a Poetry Critic

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Advice to a Poetry Critic

Each poet worth her salt adores
well-appointed metaphors,
but when they step up to the mike,
similes they only like.
Before you discuss simile
consult an expert vis a vis
the difference between the two
so you will never have to rue
mislabeling your imagery.
Hyperbole is not allusion,
so don’t add to the confusion.
Synecdoche to oxymoron––
as you choose what to write more on––
get their names right for your reader.
There’s more to poems than rhyme and meter!

For dVerse Poets we were to make use of simile in a poem.
I fudged a bit and gave instructions as to its proper use!