Tag Archives: Judy Dykstra-Brown Poetry

NaPoWriMo 2015, DAY 14: The Holy Apewoman of Mexico

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th-8th-9th-6

The Prompt: Write a poem that takes the form of a dialogue. My dialogue takes place between my 7 year old self and my 67 year old self who, ironically, is writing this in Mexico.


Childhood Dreams

7
The mysteries
of Grandma’s barn
and basement–
whole lost worlds down there.
Our own attic–that door held down
by a gravity never challenged.

I wanted to see
the hanging gardens of Babylon,
Mexico and Africa–
all these places from books,
their pieces jumbled together
like puzzle pieces
in the deep recesses of my closet,
scattered,
but ready for assembly
some day
when I would
make my future memories
happen.

67
I crouch with myself at seven–
sharing imagined dangers
in deep closets,
trying to conjure the world.
So many small town stories
overlooked
while I dreamed of living
in those fairy tale places
of Bible stories
that stood on a shelf
sandwiched between
the Bobbsey Twins
and Tarzan.

Some of us spend our lives
trying to be like books,
then spend our old age
trying to remember childhood,
mainly remembering
childhood’s dreams.

*

NaPoWriMo 2015: Two Abecedarian Poems: Loving Thy Enemy and Raw Savage Thoughts

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Loving Thy Enemy

Age
becomes
creative.

Don’t ever fictionalize
great heroic intimacies.

Just keep looking
major nemeses over,
proudly quieting
rash stabbing thoughts.

Under violent words,
xenophobic
yearnings
zing.

****

Raw Savage Thoughts

Zealous young
xenophobic wanderers
veer under
the sun’s rays,
quitting promenades
over nomadic mesas.

Let’s keep jumping
into harsh green fields,
eternally delving closer
before age accents
belligerent crankiness.

Delicious effervescence
froths gushingly homeward
in jugulars,
keeping lymphatic matters
normal or palpitating,

quickening
raw savage thoughts.
Understanding vulcanizes
woman’s X-rated,
yearnful zest.

The Prompt: Write an abecedarian poem – a poem with a structure derived from the alphabet. You could write a poem of 26 words, in which each word begins with a successive letter of the alphabet or a poem of 26 lines, where each line begins with a successive letter. I wrote one that went A to Z and a second that went Z to A and back to Z.

New World Miracle: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 9

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New World Miracle1
New World Miracle2 New World Miracle3

Today’s prompt is to write a visual poem.  This is one I tried to publish earlier this year when WordPress was not accepting pingbacks, so perhaps not many have seen it, and certainly not in this form, as when I published it, it was all evened out into regular stanzas by the blog formatting.  It occurred to me to save it in jpeg and treat the pages as photographs and that seems to have worked.

http://www.napowrimo.net/participants-sites/

NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 8–Palinode Poem

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The Prompt: Write a palinode–a poem in which the poet retracts a statement made in an earlier poem. if you don’t have an actual poetically-expressed statement you want to retract, maybe you could write a poem in which you explain your reasons for changing your mind about something.

Of Stable Mind

There’s nothing I said yesterday that I’d like to retract.
Such wishy-washy thought systems leave me cold, in fact.
Those things that I believed in last week, last month, last year
are pretty much the standards that I still hold dear.
I’m not veering toward the right. I don’t like war games much.
Haven’t changed my taste for chocolate or changed to Greek from Dutch.
I still like Indie movies, the Avett Brothers and
prefer the beach to mountains as I like my walks in sand.
Though change is epidemic with apps changing every day,
when it comes to my beliefs, I think that I’m just going to stay
right here in the middle of the leftward slanting crowd–
where thinking for yourself is both encouraged and allowed.
No knee jerk either way, please, and respect for everyone
so long as they aren’t given to persuasion with a gun.
So I’ll post no apologia for anything I’m thinking.
I’ll row home in the boat I came in even if it’s sinking!

NaPoWriMo, Day 3: In the Market

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I had a reading to go to this morning, where I read both “At 67” and “Once Upon a Lime in Mexico,” but you heard them both here first!  “At 67” will also be published in Ojo del Lago, Mexico’s largest English Language newspaper/magazine, which is both in print and online.  Before I left at 9:30 for the reading, I got part of today’s blog post finished and I completed it in the Walmart parking lot, where I’d gone to do a bit of shopping.  Dreading the stop-and-go Semana Santa traffic, I decided to finish it so it would be ready for posting when I got home,  which it is and I am!!!  So, here goes.

I’ve been trying to combine the NaPoWriMo and the WordPress prompts each day. The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write a “fourteener” poem where each line consists of seven iambic feet (i.e., an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, times seven.) This form is also called a ballad.

No topic was given, so I took a WordPress Prompt and went to a friend’s book and turned to page 11 and took the 11th word, which was “Should,”  and started a poem entitled “She Should.”  I later changed the title and the first line, so the words that started the poem no longer are part of it. The purpose of a prompt is to start, not serve as an end-all. So, here is my ballad.  Please let me know what you think.

In the Market

Her mother tells her not to talk to strangers in the streets–
to count on all her kin to provide everyone she meets.
But this man has such lovely eyes, so what could be the harm?
And she’s not often left to stray this far from father’s farm.
When he walks by, she gives a smile and looks him in the eye.
He looks away, but his shy smile still gives away the guy.
She drops her basket, but he still continues on his way.
It’s only then that she decides that this one must be gay.

The store where she is going is not so very far,
and yet she takes the longest way that leads there from her car.
Although it should be blocks away, instead it is two miles.
She only has this route and back to practice all her wiles.
Whenever gentlemen of note meet her questing glance,
Her winsome smile becomes a grin, her walk becomes a prance.
Some of the men seem to be shocked. The others move away.
She’s sure it is just married men she meets this market day.

But finally, one man in plaid does not avoid her glance.
She smiles at him invitingly, afraid she’ll lose her chance.
She sees him turn as she walks by and follow in her wake.
It seems she’s finally hooked one. It was a piece of cake.
When she arrives and goes into the store, he follows her.
It’s just so he can meet her, of this she’s fairly sure.
Aisle after aisle she meets his gaze by boldly looking up
while he pretends he’s looking for food on which to sup.

Pork and beans he passes up, chili and green beans.
He adjusts his shoulders and hitches up his jeans.
She knows that he’s not used to this. He’s not so debonair.
He will not meet her flirty glance or even her bold stare;
and yet she sees him peeking when it seems that she’s not looking.
It’s clear enough to her that something’s definitely cooking.
She’s been around the livestock so she knows the signs and causes,
yet a bull just gets right to it and a rooster never pauses.

The action quickens in the aisle where the bread shelves start.
She finally takes the upper hand and swerves into his cart.
The metal baskets scrape and crash and make an awful din.
She does not mind that people gawk. She finally has an in!
He blushes when she talks to him, and she is sure he nearly
takes her hand and flirts as he says, “Pardon,” very clearly.
He turns and walks her down the aisle. It is a date, almost.
Side by side they stroll until parted by a post

that splits the aisle in two and makes them part, then join again.
Though she is small and portly, and he is tall and thin,
they make a handsome couple. She can see their wedding stills.
She will pick the gown and flowers. He will pay the bills.
When they approach the registers, he tells her to go first.
They chat as the checker works. It almost seems rehearsed.

He asks about her family and certainly seems rapt.
The lives of mother, father, brother, sister clearly mapped.
Details others might find boring are engagingly related
and all the while his pupils stay entirely dilated.
He puts his thumb right through a peach, then grabs up a red apple,
and tells her that he’s noticed her in front of him in chapel,
sitting by her sister and wearing a blue hat.
Her sister’s hat was yellow.  He is sure of that.

When she asks him home to supper, he says, “Yes,” in nothing flat.
He talks to all her relatives and even holds the cat.
When her annoying sister talks and talks and talks,
he responds politely–he never even balks.
He finally admits that he’s engineered their meeting,
but still the news of it does not set her heart to beating.
Now it is family legend, the story of this mister,
with an unexpected ending. He was there to meet her sister!

 https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/three-letter-words/

NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 2: Stars

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                                                                    Stars

Sometimes, on an Indian blanket spread on the night-dewed grass, I became aware of them.
They were always there waiting in the ever-clear South Dakota nights.
Anything could have happened on a night like that,
Reclining with no ceiling over us,
Silence split by crickets, frogs, the chipped barks of dogs.

Summertime freed us to the great outdoors.
Traitors to our beds, we chose the long-grass cushioned backyard.
Attacks by neighborhood boys an exciting possibility,
Rescues by my bellowing dad, in jockey shorts, standing on the back porch.
Sleep not on our agenda for hours afterwards.

Slumber parties meant for anything but slumber.
Taking a walk at midnight and crossing the path of no one.
Air in the night a different elixir
Returning to roll in the grass in shortie pajamas—that pre-sexual thrill.
Stars of our own summer, we strutted our stage until the wee hours.

Something in the night freeing something in us.
Taken by the stars to other selves, far above us.
Aware of the mysteries laid out like a path in front of us.
Returning reluctantly to our pre-teen lives,
Safe beneath the dangerous stars.

The WordPress prompt today was to write about texting, but Since I have never texted anyone in my life, thought I’d tell you what life was like in a pre-text world. And here’s a picture to go with both the subject of texting (old-time style) and the above poem:
https://grieflessons.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/a-photo-a-week-challenge-muted-colors/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/its-a-text-text-text-text-world/

Silvestre

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Silvestre

The passion of the wallflower
pressed between the pages of
her garret room
may range farther
than the wildflower.

She hides it by day
under her mattress,
the only evidence of it–
ink bled into her fingertips.

Through the long night,
her pen spills her to infinity
with the wild stars
on the other side
of closed shutters,

immersed in waters
she has never stepped into–
plunged into by words
that she gives over to
night after night
after long year.

Words so sensual
that her father,
if he sees
from that dark Hell
any fair creator
would have sent him to,
must not be capable of haunting
or he would.

She imagines him
watching her submit
to a different lover
every night–
her back bleeding black
from the ink of the passion
he has pressed her to.

As if her submission
were the most dynamic
of all works;
as if no one
had ever said Yes
like that.


In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Third From the Top.” The Prompt: Go to your blog reader. Scroll down to the third post in the list. Take the third sentence in the post, and work it into your own post. (The line taken from my reader is the last italicized stanza of my poem. You can see the entire poem by Luci Shaw that it was excerpted from HERE.) And my poem is fiction, folks!

I woke up with the word “Silvestre” streaming through my mind. I knew that I knew what it meant, but in the end I had to look it up. Of course. It means “Wild” in Spanish. Even before I looked at the prompt, I knew this had to be my topic and as it turned out, it worked with the quote I was given. Thus, the name of the poem which might better have been named “Wild Words” but I like “Silvestre” better, and Patti, it is only coincidence that it is also our father’s middle name. I would never assign our father to Hell nor accuse him of the implications in this poem. Thus, this disclaimer when normally I feel no words should have to be explained.

Hue-bris

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Hue-bris

I painted every living room wall,
but did not like the hue at all.
It did not match the sofa right.
It was too orangey and bright.

And so I sought to alter it
with another color over it.
A watery glaze applied with care
cancelled out that awful glare.

I did not like the yellow alone,
but thinly o’er the other tone
it did the trick and looked superb.
One color did the other curb.

Carefully on a section ample
I painted out a color sample
to show the painter what to do–
watered yellow over orangeish hue.

He was an artist and had an eye
for form and structure, grass and sky
but his talent was not English or
my talent was not Spanish, for

when I came home at end of day,
my cry was one of real dismay.
What had he done, this artist fellow,
but take the undiluted yellow

and cover all the orange up?
The room looked like a buttercup!
I shook my head in real distress.
It clashed with sofa, hair and dress.

Next day, the paint store saw me coming.
The owner smiled and started humming.
Money in hand, I came each day
to pay and pay and pay and pay.

Alas, selections were not ample.
I knew they did not have a sample
right for me and so I got
ten liters of yellow and also bought

orange and white and brown and green,
blue and every hue between.
I took them home and mixed them up–
tint after tint in a gallon cup.

And pretty soon I had a stew
of every little shade and hue
and when I put it on the wall,
I found it was the best of all!

It matched my sofa and my eyes.
It clashed not with the lawn nor skies.
It went with pictures, sculpture, table.
I mixed as much as I was able,

then called the painter and asked him when
he could paint my room again.
This time I watched as he covered up
wall after wall from my mixing cup.

Now four layers grace my sala wall
each over each, one under all.
White, then orange, yellow and
that lovely concoction mixed by my hand.

In other rooms, each wall I made
a different hue of blue or jade
or red or mustard, orange or gold.
My house is varied and very bold.

Guests say they like the colors I chose
but when they see the gold or rose,
they cannot possibly suppose
how many colors are under those!


The Prompt: orange. and also, Hello, Goldilocks–Write about a time you had a Goldilocks experience, exploring different choices and finally arriving at “just right.”  https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/daily-prompt-4/
DSC02409

UFOs At Roswell

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UFOs at Roswell

Roswell has been debunked, I hear. There’s nothing there at all.
And yet, I’d like to be a fly clinging to its wall.
I think there really might have been a craft and little men,
or something left of evidence that once they might have been.

A piece of foil or metals rare–some say they found them there.
Others just say weather balloons–nothing very rare.
Some say they saw a little man taken from the craft,
while government officials say they’re merely daft.

I do not know the truth of it but keep an open mind,
for minds that are not open qualify as blind.
And if Wikipedia is right in ruining all our fun,
then maybe I’ll just fly over to Area Fifty-One.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident

The Prompt: Fly on the Wall–If you could be a “fly on the wall” anywhere and at any time in history, where and when would you choose? https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/fly-on-the-wall/

Post-Migraine Depression

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Disclaimer: Yesterday I suffered my first migraine in sixteen years or so.  I had just been telling a friend how long it had been since I’d had my last one and the best way to overcome them when suddenly, a few days later, when I was standing on a ladder putting away material in my studio, I grew dizzy and would have fallen off the ladder if I hadn’t had a chair back and file cabinet to steady myself on.  Soon after, the migraine descended, along with the nausea and this time with a shortness of breath that was probably psychosomatic but which made me feel as though I was going to suffocate.

What was worse is that there was no one around–no one in my neighborhood–no one I could think to call.  When I tried to think of someone to email or Skype, my mind fogged and I couldn’t figure out how to type the letters or who exactly to call–just to have a sense of presence.  I was too sick to talk and could barely even stand the distraction of calling on Skype.  Nor could I figure out how to actually make the call.  Luckily a friend who was about to leave on a trip to another town and who was already connected to me by Skype, contacted an old friend and she called me and talked me down a bit, poor thing, talking for ten minutes or so without relief.  All I needed was some soft distraction so I did not think about not being able to breathe.

Today just the slight edge of a headache is there. Enough so I dare not bend down or chance seeing a bright light or smelling the odor of Jacaranda, which I am afraid is what caused the problem this time, but I have started thinking about old age and being alone and vulnerable and all of those things I’ve never really thought of seriously before.  When I tried to write something else entirely, what got written was the rather self-indulgent piece below.  My impulse is to put it away and to write something else, but I also have a curiosity about whether others might have the same feelings sometimes so I just might have another look at it and print it with the understanding that when such things are written, they sometimes serve as their own antidote.

Or, perhaps the extreme of what I wrote is simply priming the pump–a surge to get me going.  Well, I’ll have another read and we shall see.  If I do print it, I’d appreciate comments–lots of them–no matter how negative.  My grandmother used to say a Dutch phrase when she was feeling sorry for herself, “Mama Miet mi Dote!” (Mama might be dead.) It became our family’s saying, only my mother (her daughter-in-law), who didn’t understand Dutch, said “Mama Milk My Goat.”  My dad thought this was funny so never told us differently until I went to college and tried to use it and got blank stares from all those who didn’t know the phrase I thought everyone used.  It was then my dad ‘fessed up.  So, “Mama Milk My Goat.” Yes, I am feeling sorry for myself in the ditty below, but it helps to rave sometimes and tomorrow is another day.  For now, I’m lying low for one more day.

Post-Migraine Depression

My life is growing narrower, the walls are closing in.
I don’t care where I’m going or care where I have been.
I never thought life would wear out or that I’d tire of it,
but suddenly the life around me does not seem to fit.
We’re schooled to be cheerful and to make the best of life–
to emphasize our happiness and overlook the strife,
but somehow everything has changed. Perhaps it is the weather,
for suddenly I feel my life is on too short a tether.

I think I’ve worn my old life out but cannot seek a new one.
I’ve simply not the energy to try again to do one.
So I shall lie abed today to contemplate my fate–
to have a look at what I do and what is on my plate.
I need to feed the dogs and then to feed my own self, too–
to dress myself and try to put each shoe in front of shoe.
My grandma was a martyr and perhaps I am the same,
but I don’t try to make this into any other’s blame.

I simply feel that I must stir the pot up once again–
take off on an adventure someplace I’ve never been.
Find a niche and fill it and live a simple life.
Try to find diversion without turmoil or strife.
To inspect the Caribbean or a tiny town in Spain.
Live alone in solitude with nothing to explain.
My family is scattered and has no need of me.
In terms of obligations, I am really fancy free.

So if you do not see me later on this blog,
just know that I have gone away and slipped my usual cog.
Perhaps I’ll be beach combing or traveling out to sea.
Perhaps I’ll be investigating what else I can be.
My life will soon be over and although I’ve had the best,
I feel that I need more of it before my final rest.
Or, I may not stir at all. I guess I must admit,
perhaps my need is satisfied by contemplating it.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/we-built-this-city/