Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

Divine Providence, for dVerse Poets

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Image by  Alireza Dolati

Divine Providence

The wings of destiny are stilled, waiting for our play.
Astonished at our slowness, confused at the delay.
Disappointment in mankind by now’s a usual thing.
What new human horror will the future bring?

We’ve poisoned oceans, sullied air and burdened earth with junk.
Enough to put Ma Nature in a perpetual funk.
She balks and sends out warriors to try to curb our lusts,
but still mankind continues to turn shouldn’ts into musts.

She now sees she was misguided in creating human fools,
with all of their excesses flaunting all her rules.
Soon she’ll find another way to try to clear her slate of them
as destiny stands waiting to see what is the fate of them.

For dVerse Poets, we were to choose a Spanish term to use for the subject of a poem. In Spanish,  Divina Providencia means destiny with choices and spiritual interventions. My poem is about how mankind has unfortunately chosen to respond  to that divine providence.

Going Spiral

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Georgia O’Keeffe, A Piece of Wood I (1942), oil on canvas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gift of The Burnett Foundation

Going Spiral

Few easily attain the goals that are their aspiration
without initial effort that requires perspiration.
Most of us must labor to gain what we desire,
but although we go in circles,  each circle spirals higher.

 

For dVerse Poets we were to write a poem based on a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

“Underworld” for dVerse Poets Magical Realism Prompt, Apr 20, 2025

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Underworld

Under the sand are palaces. I’ve seen them in my dreams:
vast halls and empty chambers smoothly rounded at their seams.
Every wall is made of sand. Each ceiling, archway, floor––
as though carved by master craftsmen, digging at its core––
is so magnificent, you’d think they were the stuff of lore.
You may also see them, but you must provide the door.

Though the chambers are filled in, they’re there without a doubt.
You are the one creating them by what you will scoop out.
The beauty’s hidden in the sand, waiting in your sleep
for you to dig the castles out from where they’re buried deep.
All your day’s exhaustion your dream labor will abort,
for what you build in slumber is work of a different sort.

Sand brought to the surface is what you get to keep
of subterranean palaces dug out in your sleep.
As you build aboveground castles in the world that we all know,
you reveal the outward structure of the inner rooms below,
furnishing the magic that the world will see through you,
showing what’s inside of you by what you bring to view.

for dVerse Poets: Magic Realism
Image:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra_Paulette

To see more poems go HERE

Little Lies for dVerse Poets

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Necessary Untruths

A game of hide-and-seek
not behind chairs or under tables
within thickets or crouched in deep culverts
but obscured between sharp truths.
That white lie
you tell yourself
just to keep going.

 

To read more poems to this prompt, go here: dVerse Poets

For the dVerse Poets April Fools prompt: Lies

The Visitor for dVerse Poets “Personifying the Abstract,” Mar 26, 2025

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The Visitor
(In a Time of Covid)

My day is a guest who arrives too early,
starting the party without me to the insistent drumbeat
of a distant all-night party not yet over.
Its music sketches a portrait of my distant past:
wild nights, the sharp bite of tequila,
casual passion draped across my back.

Kukla the girl cat’s clever claws push me from my bed. 
Other than her insistent cries for desayuno,
this new day written across my life
comes with invisible directions. 
It smells like fresh-blooming plumeria
and tastes like Nescafé with Coffee-Mate and stevia.

It is too tame, this safe life with so many hand-washings
that they rise to my tongue and foam as I speak to myself in the mirror,
keeping six feet of distance even with myself
as I wait for the arrival and my capture
by this distant threat creeping ever closer.

“Sangre de Cristo,” mutters Jesus the water vendor,
taking his own name in both vein and vain as he
reminds me to keep my distance—
La señora, no matter how generous a tipper, now a threat.
I sweep his footsteps from the doorway,
set them on fire and gather their ashes for a poem.

The birds sing their way into my verses,
as does the snake that lies coiled in my kitchen sink.
I taste the language of all of them,
real life as surreal as any dream—
this world a wasp nest,
each of us sealed up in our individual cell.

Without a life, I write one for myself.
You are invited to join it here on my sanitary screen.
Make your rejoinders more clever than Alexa’s or Siri’s,
so I can dispense with the both of them.
Imagine me touching your words I cannot hear,
and make them less sharp than what you might be feeling.

A stream of family music from below
flows up the mountainside to pool in my ears.
I breathe the perfume of that family.
I savor its taste—tamarind, lime and salt,
the homeyness of bland tortillas—
and hope they are kept safe there.

For dVerse Poets. To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge #220

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The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

That name engraved across my mind
is of the phantasmic kind.
The one who seems to have carved it there
is one for whom I do not care.
It is not grounded in truth or fact.
It seems my thoughts have just been hacked.

 

 

for dVerse Poets

To see other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

“Indigo” for dVerse Poets, Feb 24, 2025

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Indigo

The color known so well by teens
that is used to color jeans?
Bet you thought, as I thought, too,
indigo was a shade of blue.
Yet, upon further inspection
during internet detection,
it seems more pupleish a hue
which transforms itself to blue.

For dVerse Poets Quadrille Monday the prompt is “indigo.” (Image by Levi Strauss)

To read more Indigo poems, go HERE.

“Dropped Glove,” Madrigal Poem for dVerse Poets

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Dropped Glove

When love first blooms it seems eternal love
Impossible that it might fall away
What use is love that doesn’t choose to stay?

At first love seems to fit one like a glove
that warmly cloaks our hand both night and day
When love first blooms it seems eternal love
Impossible that it might fall away

We know not what love’s garment is made of.
We only note when it begins to fray
and loosens more and more along the way.
When love first blooms it seems eternal love
Impossible that it might fall away
What use is love that doesn’t choose to stay?

For dVerse Poets we were to write a Madrigal poem. Here are the rules for an English Madrigal: :Content: Often includes a theme of love
*Usually written in iambic pentameter.
*Comprised of three stanzas: a tercet, quatrain, and sestet.
*All three of the lines in the opening tercet are refrains.

Form: A thirteen-line form in three stanzas:
Stanza 1] Tercet -Three lines
Stanza 2] Quatrain – Four lines
Stanza 3] Sestet – Six lines

[L1] A (refrain 1)
[L2] B1 (refrain 2)
[L3] B2 (refrain 3)

[L4] a
[L5] b
[L6] A (refrain 1)
[L7] B1 (refrain 2)

[L8] a
[L9] b
[L10] b
[L11] A (refrain 1)
[L12] B1 (refrain 2)
[L13] B2 (refrain 3)

Go HERE to read other poems created to this prompt.

Mulberry

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Mulberry

Vincent, what skewed your branches, streaked your sky,
and drew tormented waters from above?
What crops, obscured by grasslands
pressed to earth?
What part of you
at rest beneath that tree––
now only your marker
left for us to see?

For dVerse Poets
To see other responses to this prompt, go HERE.

The Taste of Love for dVerse Poets

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The Taste of Love

What we feasted on
in those first stages of internet romance—
when nine hours was too short a conversation—was words.
We passed on to the next stage of computer dating:
our first dinner date.
He watched on his desktop computer as I prepared a salad.
This was a long and lengthy process
I recorded as closely as was possible,
using the camera from my laptop.

A prisoner of his large unmovable console computer, I watched his empty desk chair
as he repaired to the kitchen to prepare his meal, hearing sound effects but little else.

When he returned to the living room, he laid his meal in front of his computer.
I had yet to see it as I, in turn, placed my salad in front of me and took my first bite,
watching closely my technique according to my Skype image.

I chewed politely and then smiled,
revealing the lack of lettuce shards on my front teeth.
I looked up. He was watching me as lovingly as usual.
Now, it was his turn.

What are you eating? I asked. Ham, he said.
He lifted a huge hunk on his fork, taking a dainty bite
and chewing happily.
What else? I asked. Just ham, he answered.

And so he demolished the entire pound of thick ham steak,
now and then washing it down with a healthy swig of rum and Coke.

Rum and Coke.
It had been one of our bonding experiences
to find that the drink of choice for each
was Bacardi Rum with caffeine-free Diet Coke.
How could this not be a romance made in heaven?

Culinary compatibility from 2,000 miles away
seemed to be less of a problem than it would be months later,
when we first made physical contact.

But, there was a resolution. He started munching on carrots and I had no objection to ham.
We discovered a mutual mania for potato chips, and true romance bloomed
when I found the full bar of Hershey’s chocolate atop his refrigerator.
Who says we need to concentrate on our differences?

For dVerse Poets we were to post a poem about internet romance in honor of Valentines Day