Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

Pied Beauty II

26 Replies

apple pie!!

I wrote this “Apple” poem as a  parody of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty.” His poem is below mine…

Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

The dVerse Poetsprompt today is apples.

An Open Letter to the N.Y. Times Regarding Their Sunday Crossword

18 Replies

IMG_5434

An Open Letter to the N.Y. Times Regarding Their Sunday Crossword

Your circular riddle’s an impossible pill
to swallow. Your blanks I struggle to fill.
The crux of the matter? I never know
just how to harvest the seeds that you sow.
I find your clues exceedingly queer.
Your genius outreaches my talent, I fear.

 

Prompt words today are circular, riddle, outreach and crux. I’m also answering the dVerse Poet’s Quadrille Challenge making use of the word fill in a 44-word poem.
Here’s the dVerse prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2020/02/10/quadrille-97-filling-the-page/

Lost World

14 Replies

IMG_5651

Lost World

There is no skin for our ceiling.
No skin.
The moon, like an animal, 
hovers over and around our houses.

In their caves, twitching iguanas live their small deaths
while, caught by moonlight, my friends go sleepless.
I follow my heart in circles, mutter protests to the stars,
running first against, then with
the incredible crocodile.

There is no skin–not any–for the ordinary world.
The dead in their graves are still for a very long time.
Then they rise to pass again around the circle.
The children are easily sleeping.
Tomorrow they will question the old women
with the candor that is necessary
to rub the callouses from their souls.

Straining to the song of life which calls,
“Awaken. Awaken,”
the mouths of the rising dead eat the steaming earth
and under them, in the earth,
are layers of the innocent
with the hearts of dead flowers
because they have neither the fragrance of life,
nor the beat of it.

When they were alive, they
spilled coins from their purses
and from their mouths, spilled prayers for their recent sins.
All of them balanced the two sides of sadness–
the sadness of seeing, and the sadness of not seeing.

At the time of death, all wash themselves clean of their friends.
And God, the rider through life––
through all things holy as well as all things evil––
hovers near the ceiling
while the refugees shake their brothers,
like water, from their hair.

This God,
who in life took passage in an ordinary boat,
who left his resurrection like a butterfly disappearing,
now travels with light,
words like new flowers on his tongue,
Whispering, “Now. Wake up.”

A sentry walks the escarpment of the reservoir–
an angel who grew up in the trench of the soldier
and the boat of the apostle––
an angel with the teeth of a serpent
who sings all night,
his beautiful face lifted to the violent sky.
“Where are the hands of my mother?”

There is no skin for his ceiling. 
No skin. No skin.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
replaced by fire.
No skin left for our world.

We are caught in a too-long day
that fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music
from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams

where we forget the large lie
and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart
are not just
theater.

 

for dVerse Poets open link night

King Neptune’s Joust

17 Replies

Image by Daniels Joffe on Unsplash, used with permission

King Neptune’s Joust

Who seeks to best the ocean’s roar 
is just a fool, and no more—
delusional right to his core.
The protection of the knights of yore—
that plaited metal that they wore—
was but a many-chambered door 
that led them to the ocean’s floor.

For the dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Roar. 

Venus in the Year 2020

14 Replies

IMG_6981

Venus in the Year 2020

She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.

She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.

From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.

She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.

She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.

Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.

With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.

She
stands.

 

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Respite

8 Replies

Version 2

Respite

Although it is the day lit world that shouts at me, it seems
that when darkness closes, you echo in my dreams.

 

For dVerse Poets: Echo

Monument

25 Replies

IMG_0005 2

Monument

A cow is screaming across the arroyo. Fireworks explode in honor of whatever saint’s day is being celebrated this week, drowning out her loud shrieking bellows. It is twelve hours later that someone finds the cow, her horns caught in the wire fence. Too late to save her, they do the kind thing and a single shot rings out. When her owner leaves her for the buzzards, a stench settles over the neighborhood, and we pay a man to cover her in quicklime. It is months later that someone ventures up to find a perfect effigy of the cow—jaws open in her last cries of agony. In mistaking concrete for quicklime, the man we paid to do away with her has instead constructed her monument. Immortalized on that mountain where few others will ever see her, I often see her in my dreams.

For dVerse Poets, we were to write a story of 144 words or less that made use of the line about the screaming cow above. You can read the stories others wrote on the topic by hitting the dVerse link above. This one is exactly 144 words. True story, by the way.

Seaside Soliloquy

28 Replies

Seaside Soliloquy

Out beyond the breakers, you curl and curl and curl,
until you reach that breaking place where you start to unfurl.
Then you slap your underbelly on the sand’s soft lap.
Clap!
Before sneaking back and under, rolling back out there,
past a reef of coral, without a human care,
free again,
’til you begin
to curl and curl and curl.

 

For dVerse Poets, Apostrophe  (Apostrophe is a poetic device in which you address an inanimate object, animal or a person not present.)

Affirmation

32 Replies

IMG_3094

Affirmation

That crepey neck.
I’m going to look like my Grandmother.
But I refuse to wear blue tennis shoes like her,
and when my jewelry starts turning black,
I’ll stop wearing it.
I won’t use straight pins for buttons
or rat my hair and roll it in a bun.
I won’t  save Cracker Jack prizes in canning jars
or give all my money to the Seventh day Adventists.
I will not save food in my purse to take home from family dinners,
and I won’t let so many cats sleep in the henhouse.

 

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night

If You Can’t be Real, be Surreal (I Just Get My Religion from People)

33 Replies

 

I Just Get My Religion from People

She hooks one long red fingernail
and her left ear disappears.
She points the nail tip to her thumb
and the table rises into the air.
She wrinkles her nose and the table
comes down but the lights go out.
When they come on,
she’s gone but her shoes are still
under the table,
one toe pointed backward––
one heel broken.

Music shows in the air,
hung there by its black tails.
I open a window, blow
jazz to the corners of the room.
I open the door and her shoes walk
out on the wrong side of each other.
“How’s she doing today?” asks the doorman
on my way out.
“We’re getting her act together,” I say.
Catch up to her shoes at the
taxi stand at the corner,
hail them a cab.

For the dVerse Poets Surreal Poetry prompt.

 

 

 

verseVV