Serving up Karma for Donald Trump
When it comes to authority, Karma takes the cake.
What starts out as a landslide ends up as a quake.
She is no polite lady. She dishes and she serves
what you’ve done in one life as the coming life’s hors d’ oeuvres.
So be careful of schemes you cook up, for there is no beating them.
Chances are that in the next life you may well be eating them.
Prompt words today are spacious, authority, lady, karma and take.
Sun’s up, Cheer Up!
Although the moon is obstinate, They’re waking up the sun.
It’s time to fold your dreams away, to shake out the day’s fun.
When adventure’s inconspicuous, still you can try to find it.
Time is always ticking but you can’t forget to wind it.
Knit your future to your dreams and life will be your plum.
When life can be so wonderful, why spend it being glum?
Prompt words for today are wake, inconspicuous, knit, obstinate and up.
Afternoon Under Cats.
I’m feeling lethargic, no gumption or drive.
If you saw me now, you would doubt I’m alive.
I’m flat on my back in a bit of a bind,
looking for energy that I can’t find.
So though I need coffee to wash down some Bayer’s,
my cats are on top of me, piled in layers.
Obstinate creatures, they simply won’t move.
They laze around daily with nothing to prove.
And what must be giggles just come out as purrs.
I need me some whips and I need me some spurs
so I can herd cats from their comfy position
that they have adopted as part of their mission
to make sure that I do not deign to stir,
remaining inert under bundles of fur.
Prompts for today are gumption, layer, giggle, obstinate and find.
Collecting Myself
My juvenile aspirations were not like any others––
my idols not my parents or my sisters or my brothers.
I wanted to be different, intrepid and exploring
regions and activities less mainstream and less boring.
I felt my whole identity tied up in what I did,
but my friends had just a glimpse of me–for most of me just hid,
waiting for a time when the world would want to see
all that biggest part of me that was really me.
When it finally happened, I came out bit by bit,
each part coming into view as I discovered it
through doing and by trying, by traveling and proving.
It seems I only sloughed off walls as I kept on moving.
Parts of me found here and there in every varied clime.
I’m still finding parts of me up to the present time.
Daughter, friend and lover, writer, artist, wife––
to discover all of them is what creates a life.
Today’s prompts are intrepid, differ, glimpse, juvenile and identity.
Finches
Each year the nest more delicate, nonetheless they return,
my faithful little finches, watching it by turn
until the eggs all hatch and the nestlings start their squeal,
prompting parent after parent to fly off to find their meal.
In the rafter near the kitchen, they continue serenading,
keeping up their clatter as their folks go promenading,
in search of constant aphids and seeds that are their food,
creating angry nestlings, demanding in their mood.
Of all of nature’s visitors, these finches are the best,
although I’m glad my kitchen is not my place of rest.
Their insistent chirping is not the stuff of dreams.
Their continual conversation begins with the first beams
of morning sun, continuing all the long day through,
like living in an aviary at my private zoo.
Nature all around us reminds us of our place.
It humbles with its beauty and slows our human pace
to take notice of her cycles and her stubborn repetitions,
planning out each life form in particular renditions.
I cannot be but humbled as I cook up my creations,
listening to the chorus of my avian relations.
Prompt words today are return, nest, delicate and humiliate. Also, Granny’s Bird of the Day prompt.
What Can One Man Do?
I’m feeling sort of creepy. I’m feeling sort of weird.
Everything is happening as I’ve always feared.
Each heroic patriot is spinning in his grave
observing how politicos are choosing to behave.
Opportunists rule the day. Liberty is dying.
If our founding fathers saw ,it would be grounds for crying.
Rights of free assembly are brutally curtailed
by countless senseless massacres, no sooner one man jailed
than another slaughter comes across our screen.
When did our land of immigrants turn so crass and mean?
What god puts kids in cages, rips a mother from her baby?
What scripture teaches brotherhood tempered with a maybe?
One hundred thirty million of her native sons
slaughtered by our founders is how the west was won.
Our history books rewritten by a kinder pen
Mass lynchings in Arkansas? A secret way back when
history was written. Only now we know the shame.
Even at our founding, “more profit” was to blame.
If we are tired of hearing of greed and violence,
perhaps its time that more of us climbed down from the fence
and let communal voices be heard above the din
of Game of Thrones and other dream worlds we live in.
These films of gore and violence with which we are suffused
make us numb to how real people are abused.
We must take off our blinders and see the truth at last.
It’s time to break these heartless molds in which we have been cast.
Speak with your pen. Bring change about by changing those in power.
Do not turn to fantasy. Do not cringe and cower
in your homes for fear of guns. Ban assault guns for a start.
Show that real Americans have a kinder heart.
Cut our country’s cancer from where it’s gone to fester.
Remove our gallery of fools, starting with its jester.
Each one who sits upon his chair thinking his votes don’t count
votes to keep the status quo. One after one, they mount
a ship of fools who think that politicians are the same—
that refusing to make choices makes them without blame.
So thought the men who saw the tree with bodies hanging slack
and overlooked injustice because the men were black.
If your God is one of mercy, does he not view all?
Does he not see even the smallest sparrow fall?
Would he sanction kids in cages, mother ripped from baby?
Does the God who loves us all temper justice with “maybe?”
What can we do about it? Take up pen and make a check.
Vote out the opportunists. Seize injustice by the neck.
Protect our dying planet. Seize our final chance.
Don’t think that fate is ruled by impartial circumstance.
Looking for a solution for what one man can do?
Take pen in hand. The answer, my friend, is simply you!
Prompts for the day are weird, creepy, and memorialize.
We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Us
Three years of fear and loathing? The world has turned surreal.
News programs sanctify our fear, our horrors the real deal.
A man once enigmatic tweets himself too clearly.
Those truths that we held evident and came to hold most dearly
were fictions in our history books. Our empire’s like the others––
built upon the backs and bones of those we call our brothers.
Who is guilty of these sins? We all are, one by one
for watching TV movies and not the smoking gun.
Our leaders, all fine actors, draw their princely wages
While madmen fire on schools, it’s children we put in cages.
America, unite as one and see the truth about you.
See what the whole world now sees that causes them to doubt you.
If you hold religion as your reason to support
this man who isn’t really all that he might purport,
what religion really is, please take the time to see:
“What you do to the least of my children, you have done to me.”
Whatever else might profit you, this is the bottom line.
God’s children aren’t all born within the borders you define.
“Give me your tired and weary, your yearning to be free.”
Must we scrape these words off the statue of Liberty?
Open your eyes. We are no longer saviors of all.
Perhaps we never were. We turn our backs and build a wall.
Prompt words today are fear, surreal, sanctify, enigmatic and program.
Unlikely Pairing
One ungainly orphan elephant, wandering and uncertain
of where his journey’s leading him, comes upon a curtain
of mist that rises from the plain, shimmering, evanescent.
The stars now muted overhead, the moon a fuzzy crescent.
He splits the curtain, comes upon a lone and lost impala
split off from the herd during some wild stampeding gala.
They form a duo and plod on, each looking for a herd.
Such an unlikely couple. Impossibly absurd.
And yet they struck a certain chord, each one with the other.
She was the sister that he lacked, and he her missing brother.
One thing led to another. She fit him like a glove,
and before they knew it, the two were fast in love.
When the baby came, it looked a bit like a nyala,
a bit like a rhinoceros––an elephantiala!!
Prompts today are intent, orphan, elephant (good grief) and evanescent. Add this one, too: curtain.
An Aging Siren’s Lament
I once was bewitching, beguiling and busty,
but now I’m decrepit, doddering and fusty,
making mountains of molehills and blocks out of chips
and adding them onto my thighs, calves and hips.
As I fall apart, I become more voluminous,
my eyes less dewy, my skin much less luminous.
I’m developing poorly, my aging less fine
than mellow old cheeses and whiskies and wine.
As my memory fades and becomes much less credible,
I’m less appealing and for sure less beddable.
I’m held together by trusses and braces,
Spanx and Ace bandages, spandex and laces.
Someone should just shoot me. (Botox, not a gun.)
I’d be more alluring and have much more fun.
But diets are tedious. Shots must be painful.
Of all of these cures, I’m purely disdainful.
I guess I’ll age gracefully, sip from its cup
greedily, admitting I’m giving up.
I’ll simply sit here inert on my fanny
and trade in the title of sexpot for granny!
Prompts today are fusty, bewitching, chip and mountain.
Love Poem in a Time of Worldwide Dispute
When other wondrous words continue to be broken,
let us still retain one word to be our token.
While all previous words just argue and discuss,
Let the only word that we require just be “us.”
Happy 9 year anniversary, Forgottenman!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 