Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

New Birth

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New Birth

The phone rings four times in the very early morning.
I reach between the bars of the hospital bed
I have been sharing with you for the past hour
and grab the handset of the phone,
hear the long beep of the fax connecting
to announce Art Fest 2001
for the fourth time in the past two days.

Three times I’ve asked to be taken from their list.
Yet still, in this early morning
more intimate than our honeymoon,
the phone rings and rings,
as though even as you decide
to be rid of the world, the world is not quite rid of you.

At the end of your life, we pull ourselves into this house, then into this room.
“Roll the pain up in a ball,” I say, “and toss it away,”
And so, just as we had decided to venture once more out into the world,
the world rolls up into a ball of pain suspended in the air above your bed.

The morphine works only as a distraction.
You moan and make broad gestures, trying to pick the wildflowers
you see growing from the ceiling.
You say they are blue. “Not my style,” you say,
as though any flowers are your style.

You grow imperious,
calling out for chipped ice, not cubed, in the bottle, not the glass.
Knit socks become too uncomfortable, their threads pushing against your skin,
so you ask for those more finely woven.
I ease them over your swollen feet–like trying to squeeze gut over fat sausages.
You bark commands like a general, crabby no matter what the outcome.
Finding fault seems to be your new virility.

It is not the tender moments that fuel the long long days.
Your ill humor and harsh demands
raise a spirit in me where before I wavered.
I need not answer back to feel my strength growing day by day.
I can do anything–deal with any bodily fluid, most abuse.
I can take the blanket off and put it back again
a dozen times in as many minutes.

I take NoDoz for the first time since college,
trying to stay awake to drive you to the doctor’s office.
After so many nights with little sleep,
I pound my hand against the wheel to hurt myself awake.

Trying to make you comfortable
has become an impossibility,
and although it breaks my heart,
it does not break my soul.
You are constantly mad at me,
I always on the way to being a little mad at you.
That’s the way we get through this.

When you fall in the shower,
you lie as though crucified,
your body slight now–
Christlike in your suffering
as the water rains down on you.
When I turn it off and reach out to help you,
”Leave it on!” you snarl,
like a dog protecting his bones.
Ten minutes later, you are too weak
from the hot water
to stand on your own.
I put your arms over my shoulders
to carry you on my back,
like a penitent.

What pain feeds your anger these long weeks?
Is it the cancer or the slow hard truth
as your wife becomes your mother
and you, a child–
petulant, demanding,
are borne once more,
this time away from her.

 

The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem on the subject of birth.

The Passenger

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The Passenger

I see her back her car outside.
She never offers me a ride.
I go the same way she is going,
but she passes, still unknowing.

After ten long years, I stand
making no sign with head or hand.
My legs are tired. My back is bent.
My footsteps follow where she went.

It takes two minutes to go by car.
I take an hour to go that far.
If she knew, perhaps she’d say,
“Would you like a ride today?”

She would have rolled her window down
to offer me a ride to town.
I’d dust my clothes and step inside,
grateful, at long last, for the ride.

And at the bottom of the hill,
as though, perhaps, she’d had her fill,
She’d say, “I’m turning left from here.”
And I’d assemble all my gear,

and give my thank-you, even though
I need to go where she will go.
Charity goes just so far,
I think, as I exit the car.

I live about two-thirds of the way up a very tall mountain in Mexico, and often as I drive down to the main road, I give a ride to whomever I encounter walking down the cobblestones—especially the women, most of whom work as housekeepers in the houses in my fraccionamiento. But now and then when I am in a hurry or when I see a man suspicious-looking or dusted by his labors, I drive on by. Then I wonder what he is thinking as I guiltily observe him in the rear vision mirror.

 

For dVerse Poets Change of Perspective.

Home Sweet Homeland

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jdbphoto

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

Home Sweet Homeland

In homage to our homeland, we must keep it homogenous.
Protect it from the homeless, the homos and androgynous.
Being a homo sapien is not enough for entry.
To preserve our bonhomie, you must be white or gentry.
Now that you’ve ruined your homeland, must you come ruin ours?
Swarm across our boundaries? Infest our sacred towers?
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed” is seen as just a homily.
For the present powers-that-be, it’s only an anomaly.
America’s our “Home Sweet Home,” but it’s not meant for you.
We have no place for immigrants of your particular hue.

 

For the dVerse Poets prompt to write a poem making use of a Polyptoton. See other poems written to this prompt HERE.

Grossed out by Liver

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Image by JJ Jordan on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Grossed Out by Liver

Have you ever seen the quiver
of a plate of raw red liver?
Shake it and you’ll see it shiver.
Blood runs right out and forms a river.
If mom cooks it, I won’t forgive her.
I will not eat a gol darn sliver!! 

 

For Whimsygismo’s dVerse Quadrille (exactly 44 words) prompt of Quiver. Phew!!!

Canned Cantos

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Canned Cantos

Behold the simple can of soup.
Outside it’s hard. Inside it’s goop.
Cream of mushroom, turkey noodle—
kids adore the whole kaboodle.

Crass men raid the chicken coop
to gather poultry for our soup.
They chop up onions, slice potatoes,
murder mushrooms, slay tomatoes.

Must Warhol then immortalize
this canned concoction I despise?
The world agreed. He must. He should.
They called his canned art very good.

Yet this icon that he chose
to paint and to overexpose,
I could easily view myself
lined up on my kitchen shelf.

Why pay a thousand bucks or more
for something that each day I pour
into a pan and then ingest?
I think, friends, that it was a test

to see how gullible we are.
As we made this elf a star,
fanned his fame, increased his rank,
he laughed his way right to the bank.

For dVerse Poets Andy Warhol prompt.

Portrait of the Artist

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My husband was an artist and so it seemed fitting to write a profile/portrait of him that described him primarily in terms of color.

Portrait of the Artist

The artist in you
understood color so well.
And yet, even as you layered on
red and green,
so much of you was blue.

Your white hair,
loosened from the pony tail
and streaming down your back
in your wild man look,
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.

But there was
that black in you
that altered it,
that shade created
by the blend
of white and black
you knew so well.

The red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places
where it had no logical purpose for being,
that red tried to make things right.

Yet all of us
who knew you well
knew the blue.
It was the background color
of all of your days.
It was the blanket
in which we wrapped
ourselves
at night,
trying to be close,
but so often
divided
by it.

For fifteen years, I tried
to paint you yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors caught within you.

Finding the pictures you had taken of me
studying your work at the art show,
those pictures you had snapped surreptitiously
even before we  met,
I discovered, after your passing,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know
those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to whatever color your ever-after
has delivered you to.

A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.

 

The dVerse Poetics prompt is to create a profile or self-profile in verse. Go HERE to read additional poems written to this prompt by others.

For dVerse Poets Quadrille: Extinction

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jdb photo

Today I read a story about a man who led big game hunting expeditions whose claim was that he could guarantee a kill with one hundred percent surety.  Ironically enough, after shooting a water buffalo and posing with his kill, he was fatally gored by another water buffalo. This was perhaps on my mind as I wrote this poem on the subject of extinction for the quadrille challenge. Please note that I am not in favor of big game hunting. In the last lines, I’m talking about luck in a general sense, not in terms of big game hunting. I took this photo in Kenya in 1967.

 

Extinction

If we all were always winners, winning would lose distinction.
Every hunter bagging game would lead to their extinction.
So to qualify my wishes, I guess that I’ll just say
I hope when it’s your turn for luck, that it will come your way!

for dVerse Poets

Waiting in the Dark

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Waiting in the Dark

Why are you waiting in the dark
listening to the wind’s sharp bark?
Elsewhere is diversion enough––
Internet and other stuff.
Distraction is the modern mode,
emoticons to speak in code.
Don’t place yourself upon a shelf.
Come take a photo of yourself
and post it on your Facebook wall.
Introspection won’t do at all.
Log onto Tinder and make a date.
Only losers sit and wait.

 

For the dVerse Poets theme of “Waiting.” But, since I missed the post cutoff by 54 minutes, I’ll post it here! 

Unmoved

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A room. A window. Outside the window, an entire world that I have not moved through for so many years. Some of the world comes to me, it is true, and I am not so reclusive that I do not let it in. Marietta brought her newest baby just yesterday, and I held it as though I have held a baby every day of my life in spite of the fact that I have not held a baby since that first baby slipped away from me, into the arms of another woman I have never known the name of. That baby was ripped more violently from my arms than it was from my body hours before. I was not given a choice. No one knew. The baby vanished and then I vanished, off to another country. Off. . . .a cough. I spin around and look behind me. It is a new intruder. After so many years alone, two people entering my world. Perhaps if I’d kept the door unlocked all these years, more people would have come other than the boy who brings my groceries and the other woman with the many layers of skirts who brings me new medicine when I have need of it.

I do not know this new person. It is a young man who carries a machete in his hand. He is very tall. Very very tall for a Mexican, so perhaps he is a Bedouin or some other Arab from a tall tribe, plopped down in America in the way many of us have been positioned here by fate, by circumstance or by force. His skin is that beautiful golden coffee color of someone naturally dark who has also been in the sun for long periods of time or for a long lifetime.

“Disculpe, senora,” he says, as he moves into the room. When I speak to him in English, he switches to English. He has seen my tall palm with the fruit and the seeding husks hanging dangerously loose. He can scale this tree and cut them for me. It needs to be done, senora, and if I have no money to pay, he will do it for no more fee than my friendship. And if I have no friendship to offer, then he will do it for the good grace it will bring him in the universe and perhaps an easier ingress into heaven.

It is an omen, I think, and I surprise myself when I give him permission to trim the tree. He cannot know how much he looks like a young man in my past and he cannot know how uncharacteristic it is for me to allow anyone at all into my life, my room, my trust. Now I have an obligation to this man I know nothing about. He may be dangerous. Certainly, he carries a weapon. The branch of the pomegranate tree taps taps on my window, as though a strong breeze has come up in this still day. It is the fingers of the afternoon reminding me. Warning me. But then I see that it is the movement of the young man as he brushes past the tree that has set it in motion.

A large turquoise dragonfly rests on the branch that has stopped moving and that now sits isolated. Another dragonfly approaches it and seems to attach itself in an arch and they go flying away together in this impossible configuration—a broken circle. How two creatures can move as one is not something I have ever learned, not since the one person who was a part of me for so many months was pulled from my arms still weak from childbirth. If they’d waited, I would have been strong enough, I tell myself. I have been telling myself for most of my life.

After they took from me what was mine, we took a drive to a large place with many chairs. Many chairs and many people, then a corridor. Then I was on an airline and in spite of my terror, I fell asleep. I was a thirteen year old girl, accustomed to doing what I was told to do. I woke up in America, where I was driven to the beautiful house of my aunt. It was here I lived for ten more years. Here that they expected to give me a new life to encourage me to forget my old life, but as I sit for all these years in my isolation, it is the old life that I remember and remember and remember.

 

for dVerse Poets Pub.

Dream Journeys

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He woke up agitated and sweating, turned over to face in her direction. She lay on the adjacent pillow, staring at him with a haze of dreaming still over her eyes.
“I dreamt I got the job,” he said, his mind swarming with the details of discarding, packing, arranging for the move.  Then, his mind switched quickly to the alternative. What if he didn’t get the job? He had been in this state of agony for weeks. Either result contained grounds for worry.
She stirred.  Reached out for him. “I had a dream,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” he said, intent on his own quandry, barely aware of his own mechanical response. “Anything pertinent? I’m looking for signs.”
“I dreamt I was the moon.”

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For the dVerse Poets prosery prompt: The Prosery prompt starts with a line taken from a poem, and asks you to write a piece of flash fiction incorporating that line, in full, somewhere in the piece of prose. To make it a little more challenging there’s a word limit of 144 words. The line they chose was “I dreamt I was the moon.”