Rechanneling Cheer
Scribbling Christmas cards, messaging cheer
is surely the norm for this time of year,
but I think there’s something that is more seasonable,
touching more lives, and also more reasonable.
Hold back petty arguments. Cease the derision.
Why not put Christmas in every decision?
For dVerse poets quadrille prompt, Cheer.
Dropped
The night is a broken cup,
its last sip spilled
from a shattered edge.
My thirst unslaked,
I dream
dry dreams
that go unquenched
by morning’s
gentle rains.
The dVerse Poets prompt was to write a poem that was an extended metaphor. Brief poem? Brief metaphor.
Not Good Enough, America!!!
Will they carve his effigy on a golden coin
and use it for ill purposes, our country to purloin?
Will they pare back Utopia, and in their selfish carving
leave us all in danger? Leave the masses starving?
When there’s no way left to judge them, when justice has been bought,
will we all reach out too late for what we’ll wish we sought
much earlier, when there was a chance we could impeach
the ones who took Utopia farther from our reach?
The prompt words are danger, effigy, starve and Utopia.
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/07/fowc-with-fandango-danger/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/effigy/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/daily-addictions-2018-week-44/starve
dverse poets: Utopia
Happy Ending
It’s typical and just my luck
that when the fruit fell from the truck,
I didn’t adequately duck,
and so was splattered with its muck.
My hungry hens began to cluck.
The honey bees began to suck.
They made a meal of former yuck!
https://dversepoets.com/quadrille/yuck
The dVerse Poets prompt today is to take something we’ve written on September 11 of another year and to take a word or idea from that piece and write a new piece. Here is my Sept. 11 essay from 2015 that I am going to draw from. There is a link at the bottom of that post that will bring you back to the poem I’ve written today based on that post from three years ago. Wow. Complicated. Here is my present-day poem based on the word “handwritten.”Panned by Hand
Words slowly written out by hand
will in future years be panned
as much as petroglyphs in stone
carved out by flint or sharpened bone
are an anathema today,
now that we have a simpler way
to write with pencil or with pen.
Will kids remember way back then
when moms and grandmothers and dads
wrote out notes on legal pads,
or will they only go to see ’em
in a history museum?Cell phones don’t run out of ink,
spew words as fast as you can think,
don’t use up paper, wood or lead,
just use up gigabytes instead.
Thus handwriting’s a bygone art—
i’s carefully dotted with a heart,
those flourishes at ends of lines—
those curlicues and hearts and vines
scribbled in the margins? Vanished.
All our doodlings soon banished.It is the truth that progress brings
technology to replace things
dear to our hearts we thought would be
carried on by progeny.
But, alas, it is not so.
Typewriters were the first to go,
then cursive followed recently,
and soon I’m sure the powers that be
will decide all writing’s out,
and soon technology will tout
communication via brain
and then my friends, once more again
the means we’ve used to share our thought
will be outmoded, no longer taught
by school or university.
Mere ESP will surely be
worked out so we need only blink
to transmit all that we might think.Imagine, then, the problems caused
by thoughts inadequately paused.
Words penned in ink can be crossed out,
or crumpled up and then tossed out.
Not so words received as we think them—
flirtings known before we wink them.
So long, subtlety and tact.
Hello, naked glaring fact.
No thoughts scrawled or written with care.
All meaning caught in truth’s harsh glare.
The truth is, friends, that each advance
may neither further nor enhance.
Some advancement only fetters.
All in all, I prefer letters!Here is the link to dVerse Poets Tuesday Poetics in case you want to see what others did with this prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/11/poetics-on-a-loop/
We Fill in the Blanks
I write notes three times weekly in my limping Spanish for Yolanda, not because I won’t see her, but because I probably won’t remember by then what I need to tell her. She has asked me to order more vacuum cleaner bags from the states. I use the words I know, and tonight the word for vacuum has escaped my memory. So I leave this note on the kitchen island, taped to a filter I’ve found in the laundry room:
“Is this the bag for the machine for clean the floor?”
Es este la bolsa para la machina para limpiar el piso?
Then, taped to the stove top:
I’m sorry, Yolanda, but a potato broke in my oven and it is very bad! I worked for one hour and a half but it is still bad now.”
Lo siento, Yolanda, pero una papa romper in…
View original post 142 more words
Excuse # 2
Quick, take my hand before I float off
on a breeze or a sigh or a sneeze or a cough.
No telling what currents are swelling today
to pick a girl up and float her away.
Oh, excuse number one?
Hand holding is fun!
For DVerse Poets: https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/10/quadrille-64-quickwrite-something/
Click on any photo to enlarge all and view as slide series.
Ubiquitous networks of highways crisscross the face of Mother Earth–lines that age her fresh face. Pockmarks of potholes question their durability, whereas Earth lives on, in one form or another.
Dams crack and spill their water freshly across lake beds parched for centuries.
Bones of dinosaurs peek out from eroded banks of clay. Plants spread from potholes in gouged pavement. Somewhere in the arctic ice, the past lies thawing, ready to be reborn.
Who knows but that the
nightfall of mankind may be
a new world’s morning?
I don’t know what I did this week. I seem to have collected prompts from a different week for each prompt site. Perhaps I’ve been at it too long and should retire. The prompt words I somehow collected were highway, durable, ubiquitous and morning. The form is for dVerse Poets haibun challenge.
Darn! I now find even the comments and Mr. Linky for dVerse are closed, even though they say they are open all week. I guess this just isn’t my day, or I am as cracked as the pavement above…..Here are the “wrong” links I used:
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/01/fowc-with-fandango-highway/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/daily-addictions-2018-week-34/durable
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/ubiquitous/
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/03/haibun-monday-good-morning/
