Tag Archives: dVerse Poets

If I Followed the Wandering Poet for dVerse Poets, May 9, 2024

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If I Follow the Wandering Poet

Who cares
if I swim naked in my pool?
All other human occupants
have left this neighborhood behind,
leaving more room
for possums, skunks,
birds, scorpions, spiders
and me.

I keep a closer company with them
than I do with any human these days.
This week, I talk to the large caterpillar
who seems to sprout two crystals from his crown
as he sits for a day on the Olmec head
that guards my swimming pool.

Back and forth, back and forth I pass,
adding a look at him to my lap routine.
For one long afternoon,
he sits still—like Alice’s caterpillar,
but hookah-less,
meditating in this grey place.

If he were on my Virginia Creeper,
I’d be repositioning him
to the empty lot next door, but here
he seems to be a guest; and so some etiquette
keeps me from altering his placement
as he sits on stone, moving his suction cups in sequence
now and then only to alter his direction, not his territory.

Perhaps I’ve stayed too long
in this one place.
That wandering poet within me
may have somewhere it thinks I need to go.
If it creates a good alternative,
I might follow in much the same way
that I have come to this point
in my poem.
Blindly, in a maze of words,
open to what comes next.

For dVerse Poets:  Write a poem about a walkabout or pilgrimage or wandering.

“Looking” for dVerse Poets, May 3, 2024

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     Click on photos to enlarge. 

                                                                       LOOKING

Every Sunday, sitting
on a small wooden chair
memorizing verses from a Bible with my name
stamped in golden letters on the cover,
singing “Jesus loves me, this I know,”
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Then in college, 
books and beer and Buddha,
that expanded religion of poetry
and midnight discussions in
the game room. Rumi, Roethke,
Donne and Philosophy 101.
Time after time,
I found a box but didn’t fit inside.

Moving once more into a wider
world with no hard chairs. Just
a backpack and the classroom of an open road,
putting things learned into practice,
that religion of experience, heady,
I found again, box after box, but didn’t fit inside.

For dVerse Poets this week, we were asked to compose ‘Bop’ poems.

The ‘Bop’ poetic form has 23 total lines in three stanzas ordered thus, with the same one line refrain following each of the three stanzas:

  1. a six-line stanza – that poses a problem;
  2. an eight-line stanza – that expands upon that problem;
  3. a six-line stanza – that solves, or fails to solve, the problem

For this prompt, we are to include the following line as the refrain after each of the three stanzas: I found a box and put a room inside
OR:
I found a box… [add your own words to complete the line]

Prompt guidelines:
No mandatory rhyme or meter;
Experiment with enjambment;
Use minimalistic grammar

“Hot as Blazes” for dVerse Poets, Apr 29, 2024

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Hot as Blazes

I must say that I love gazing
at a fire brightly blazing.
Popping corn or making s’mores,
a well-laid fire never bores!
And when the embers fade to dust
from a fire over-fussed,
then we’ll shuffle off to bed,
toasty warm and aptly fed!

 

 

For dVerse Poets the prompt word is “Blaze”

Beholding Beauty, for dVerse Poets, Apr 17, 2024

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Click on Photos to Enlarge.

 

Beholding Beauty

You are more beautiful than you think you are,
but we don’t tell you because
it is such a pleasure to see you unaware of it,
doing everyday things in such graceful ways.

You are the Burmese cat, stepping high
over the small sculptures
on the wall where he is fed,
his tail curving into a delicate hook.

You are vibrating leaves on the hibiscus tree
adding the contrast of green
to the one exquisite yellow bloom
with its fuchsia sunset middle.

You are a child whose violet eyes
open wider to each wonder––innocent,
never knowing yourself to be more beautiful
than what you observe.

You are music, harmonious, played
on the spur-of-the-moment with no rehearsal,
fingerpaints on the wall in an incredibly wild pattern
that could not have been planned.

You are the gourmet meal
made of leftovers from the fridge,
the wonderful costume gathered
from hangers at the thrift store.

You have a beauty
you were not born to––
one that is an amalgam
of every choice you make in life.

Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder, many say,
but it is impossible to imagine
a beholder who couldn’t see it in you.

 

I hope this follows the prompt for dVerse Poets–Poem of Address.

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

Green Brownies for dVerse Poets, Apr 12, 2024

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(This poem evolved from notes that I scribbled into the margin
of our Mexican Train score sheet while visiting my friend Gloria.)

Green Brownies

The brownie that she serves me
crumbles when I try to break it in half.
Her sense of humor allows it and so I tease her.
“Gloria, this looks like the kind of food
my grandmother tried to pawn off on us—
weeks old and crusty from the refrigerator.”

“Those chocolate chips were like that when I bought them!”
she insists, even before I question their green tinge.
I think that this is even worse than the alternative,
and say so and we both laugh as she eats her brownie
and I reduce mine to dust. Not a hard task, as it turns out.

She’s had a bad infection for a week or more.
“I’m not contagious,” she insists each time she coughs
a long low rasping rumble that threatens to avalanche.
“Now stop!” she tells the sounds that explode
without permission from her chest.

“Perhaps,” I say, “These brownies are a godsend
and that’s penicillin growing on the chocolate chips.”
Then her deep coughs transform into
gasps of laughter that echo mine.

The young man there to rake the garden
looks up at us and shakes his head
at two old ladies drinking rum and
eating something chocolate,
and it occurs to me that perhaps
what the world sees as senility
is simply evolution
out of adulthood
to a higher
stage.

For dVerse Poets Open Link 360
You can see how others responded to the prompt HERE.

Cheap Thrills, for dVerse Poets

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Cheap Thrills

Stand by the door of the room with your coat still on.
Try to stay melted while he unbuttons his shirt.
He could turn you on his fingers like a carousel
hot
Try to imagine you turning him.
Try to catch hold of him.

Relax everything–

different parts of you
like clothes in a pile on the floor.
You’ll get wrinkled falling down so often
under the tornado
which has dropped him
back again
flat on you, as you melt into the bed
above his favorite spot.

He has been
wherever everyone goes

You may have crossed the equator,
traveling
all around the world and back
for things
but you have never ever
come back with the kind of prizes you can hang
on dressing table mirrors.

Your exquisite things of the world
live with you,
but you have never been
where they all go
though you have tried
and tried
and sometimes you have
nearly made it

yet,

cheap thrills, in the end,
have always evaded you.

In your deepest voice,
you want to
“Hey baby, want a few cheap thrills?”
and you want him to
sink you down
you want to almost drown
call help so he comes after you
and you rise up

together
for the splitting of an
atom     gone

til you
come
back
fall down together.

It would be a miracle.
imagine.

for dVerse Poets:
To see how others responded to the prompt, go HERE.
Image my Jayson Hinrichsenon on Unsplash.

Burnt Offering

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In some cultures, loyalty extends far beyond the fair or rational, but no one controls what happens after tradition is satisfied:

Burnt Offering
(The Virtuous Wife)

This suttee

is easier to bear with eyes closed.

She falls upon his burning pyre,

puts out his flame,

grateful for short rituals.

The pyre,

the bone,

ashes on the sheets.

He cannot touch her.

She is air.

She floats his breath.

She tracks his carbon

down the hall.

She walks

out to the Avenue,

wearing  sheerest black

with nothing but a cauldron underneath.

Her fire.

She picks a stranger

dusted by the road,

leans him against

shadows

in  the tall grass,

spills her steam,

lifts into

penumbra

above shaded hill.

 

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night 359

To see what other poems were published, go HERE

Wooden Heart (Inspired by Magritte for dVerse Poets)

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René Magritte, Discovery (1927), oil on canvas

Wooden Heart

We often wash our minds clean here on memory lane,
so what was a dark portrait is illumined once again.

Daily random memories wash up on the shore
while sadder associations stand waiting by the door.

I do not choose remembering the dark spots in our past.
It is the brighter moments that I prefer to last.

The heart I formed from copper, the heart you carved of wood.
All the broken contracts healed by all the good.

Love stories come in fits and starts and so it was with ours—
we must choose our final endings by our selective powers

to decide what we will sift from memory’s fine sand,
and though the bitter moments haven’t been fully banned,

I daily choose the moments that I will remember—
that March day when our love was young, not your final September.

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Photos will enlarge if you click on them.

When I met Bob, he was teaching art in Canyon Country, California. One day he brought me this pouch necklace he had made of leather in class. Inside was a wooden heart with his initial on one side and my initial on the other. Yes. I had to marry the man. Later, with his encouragement, I became a metalsmith and formed this heart out of copper for him. The pouch now also contains a lock of his hair, a lock of mine, a miniature bar of chocolate–his favorite food on earth–and a tiny dinosaur carved by one of his small sons in the studio where he worked with his dad. When I admired it, he gave it to me, just as Bob gave to me the family he brought with him when we married.

 

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For dVerse Poets “Everything We See”

Click on above link to see the prompt.  Click on THIS LINK to see other poems written to the prompt.

Love’s Messenger

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Love’s Messenger

If you write me a love letter
with a fine point pen or better,
I do not care with what I talk.
Give me a Sharpie, lipstick, chalk.
No matter what I may use to scrawl,
it is better than no love at all!

For dVerse Poets: Sharp

In A Pinch

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In a Pinch

A pinch of this, a pinch of that.
A pinch of salt or pinch of fat.
What is held between one’s fingers,
the thought of it most surely lingers—
those grains of salt to lick off you
or thoughts of belly fat to rue.

 

The dVerse Quadrille prompt today is pinch.
To see how others have responded to the prompt, go HERE.
Image by Ksenia Makagono on Unsplash.