Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

Some Thoughts Upon Viewing a Blue-Footed Booby

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Some Thoughts Upon Viewing a Blue-Footed Booby

A chameleon can change his color by cue,
but what’s a blue-footed booby to do?
You can’t take off a foot like you’d take off a shoe.
And when blue is the only color you view
as you walk down the beach for a mile or two,
you might fancy a color a little bit new.
Yet, step after step, his feet remain blue!
It’s the color of ink and the color of goo—
a color that any mom would eschew
if she had a choice and a chance to imbue
her fledgling’s feet with a more subtle hue.
Instead, they’re this color that both of them rue.
Amazing to witness and lovely to view,
but admit it! You wouldn’t want blue feet, would you?

 

For dVerse Poets “Blue Tuesday” poem

Runaway Bride

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Runaway Bride

I hear church bells in the distance.
Yesterday I thought I would be there,
but here I am, the runaway bride,
standing by the side of the road
with the suitcase I’d packed so carefully for my honeymoon.

I try to imagine what Richard is doing right now.
What he might be thinking.
Is my mother regretting the money she spent on my gown?
Is my father wondering about the reception—
whether they will just carry on
since he will have to pay for the hundred meals
whether they are eaten or not?
Will my sister blame me forever
for the dress I’ve made her wear with no payoff?

Who will announce
to the assembled guests
that the bride will not be in attendance? 

A truck slows. In the back are cages of chickens
and one muddy pig.
The old farmer asks where I am going.
“Anywhere you’re going,” I announce,
and hitch up my skirts,
flip my bridal veil over my shoulder
and climb up into the pickup. 

As we take off to wherever,
I notice that my veil has come off my shoulder.
Through the side rear vision mirror, I can see it 
flapping cheerily in the wind
as we drive past the church,
and I see the groom, mouth agape.

I do not wave good-bye.

Narrative Poem for dVerse Poets. Photo by Dylan  Nolte on Unsplash, used with permission.

“Mentor” for dVerse Poets Quadrille Prompt

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Riding around in the back of a jeep with the top off?
Dad, Amana Colony

Mentor

That seed of you planted in me
directs me to turn from daily tasks
to look for lost things.
Then the dust of my past,
brushed from some recess of  memory,
mixes with  imagination to fabricate
a scrap of art, a poem, a tale.

 

After I wrote this, I couldn’t decide who to use to illustrate it. Then I noticed the “art, poem and tale” and realized I’d had a mentor in each genre. My mother for poetry, my husband for art and my father as storyteller.

A quadrille is a poem with exactly 44 words. The dVerse poets prompt asks us to write a quadrille that contains the word seed.  Here is a link to the dVerse Poets page where you can read other responses to the prompt.

 

Hopscotch Flunky

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Hopscotch Flunky

When I hop on one foot, I am destined to fall.
Too much scotch and less hop is the cause of it all.
When they said toss the rock, I threw out my ice.
Any shock that I haven’t been asked to play twice?

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a poem in anapestic tetrameter

Bothersome Friends: dVerse Poets

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Bothersome Friends

I can’t be bothered caring about the way I dress.
I wear my clothes in wrinkles and my hairdo is a mess.
I don’t file my ragged nails. My cuticles are snaggy,
and please don’t bother telling me my pants seat is too baggy.

The only thing that bothers me is folks who are persnickety––
who adjust my collar, smooth my tie or pick at me.
If only they’d leave me alone to be who I am.
Why obsess about my looks when I don’t give a damn? 

 

 

The dVerse Poets prompt today is to write a “bother” poem. Image from Unsplash by Daniel Pascoa, used with permission.

Lost Again in the Animal (for dVerse Poets, 4/13/21)

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I wrote this for dVerse Poets last year but didn’t get it posted in time so the link had closed. Since it is perfect for today’s prompt, I’m going to publish it on dVerse Poets now. Here is the prompt: The challenge is to write a poem in the first person that compares some trait of ours with something animal. It should not be a whale, but another creature (mammal, fish, bird, insect, etc.) with which we have something in common.

lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

This poem nearly drove me crazy. The form kept shifting when sent to WP, decided to screen shot, then to photograph, nothing working.Then mistakenly erased the first page of the manuscript, so couldn’t even print it in WP altered form. Finally decided to settle on these photos of the poem I’d made earlier that I found in the trash. Only to find the Open Link time for dVerse Poets had elapsed!!!  (Expletive deleted.) So, here it is with all its warts, three hours later!!!! Is 1 p.m. too early to drink????

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More Than His Memory, dVerse Poets

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More Than His Memory

More than his memory, it was his scent that awakened me to the full moon scrimmed by clouds. I moved to the sliding doors and out to the jacuzzi. Who else in this world would float on the surface of the water under this remarkable moon? The curious cat came to bear company, and the dogs. One hummingbird whirred incongruous over blooms in the night. This pulse in my ear of hummingbird and blood drew one mosquito into its chorus, annoying and persistent, to drive me into the water as easily as his scent had pulled me out of my shell of troubling dreams into the glowing night. A hand smoothed a path in the water, as if to welcome me. “If you are a dreamer, come in,” he said.

 

 

The prompt was to use the line “If you are a dreamer, come in,” in a story with a beginning, middle and end that was under 144 words. For dVerse Poets.

What Little Worlds

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What Little Worlds
(Ode to a Tiny Fungi on the Rainforest Floor)

What little worlds are lost to us
there on the jungle floor
as, looking up,
we tread them underfoot.

Perhaps whole civilizations
extinguished on those orange orbs—
A solar system of planets with their denizens
too microscopic for us to see.

Heedless Gods we are, our mighty glances
overlooking much of what’s beneath us.

But for the camera lens,
how much more we would miss
as we go about our busy greater world.

 

For the dVerse Poets Fungi Prompt. Memories of the Lacandón jungle, 2008. Other small memories of that adventure are below (fungal and non-fungal.)

The Sun Hat

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The Sun Hat

Her hat’s broad brim shadows her face,
discouraging his fond embrace.

He removes the hat and then
plants a kiss where it has  been.

Both actions—kiss and hat removal
have the lady’s full approval.

So, with no further ado,
he makes it two!

For dVerse Poets: Embrace.

We Cannot Surrender Her

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We Cannot Surrender Her

Try as I might to urge her on, she will not go.
She sends me on to test the water
but remains on the shore.
Ankle deep and then no more.
Fingers trailing and then no more.
Having once found a false bottom,
she trusts no foothold.
The falling is the thing, I tell her, yet she holds back from the fall.

Let me go down, I beg her.
I will always bring you up, she answers.
This is the role we alternate being the stand-in for.
What I want she keeps me from.
What she fears I pull her toward.

How many of us, children of the fifties,
find ourselves on this seesaw, wanting to control the ride?
Relax, I tell her, but she can’t relax––fearing what relaxation brings.
She cannot surrender herself.  I cannot be content until she does.
Two-in-one, we rail against each other, then hold hands.
Comforting.  This is enough, she tells me.
Nothing is ever enough, I tell her.

This is my third major rewrite of this poem originally written in 1976. Only three lines still remain from that poem. It is perhaps finished now.

Here is the link if you’d like to participate in dVerse Poet’s Open Link night and here is the link to read other poems for dVerse Poets Open Link Night