Tag Archives: Judy Dykstra-Brown

Under the Skin

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The Prompt: New Skin—If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current “you” — a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. — who would you choose to be?

Photo on 7-3-14 at 11.35 PM #2 - Version 3

Under the Skin

Like the ugly oyster creates the lovely pearl,
I’ve made starts at being a better sort of girl.
I’ve starved and exercised until I made a brand new me,
hoping that a siren was what I would set free.
But no matter what I look like, whatever I could be,
At the end of all of it, I find I’m only me.

No Pain, No Rain

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The Prompt: When was the last time you shed tears of joy?

No Pain, No Rain

I am always the first to cry
when loved ones move away or die.
I sob when I read tragic books
‘til those around me give strange looks.
Sad movies also create gushers
as all around me, folks turn hushers,
then call out management or ushers
to warn me that I’ll have to go.
so others can enjoy the show!

I shed tears of hot remorse
at friends’ breakups and divorce.
Western music? Love gone wrong?
I sob at every single song.
In my times of great frustration,
restraint just takes a short vacation
as I shed tears of consternation.
Yes, anger makes me spring a leak.
I mop my eyes; I blow my beak.

When I lose my glasses or my keys,
bump my elbow, skin my knees—
yes, I cuss and then I cry.
It’s just the way that I get by—
relieve the tensions, curtail pain.
To stem my tears I try in vain,
knowing it’s a bit inane
for folks my age to use their tears
to express anger, sadness, fears.

It’s not appropriate to sob
when I burn the soup or botch a job.
Yet tear my favorite blouse or pants
and remain tearless? What’s the chance?
There’s just one time that I get by
and do not feel the urge to cry—
when I need not dab at nose or eye
with handkerchief or sleeve or nappie.
I do not cry when I am happy!

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Vero, age 3, lives at La Ola girls’ home in Jocotepec, Jalisco, Mexico, and the only time I’ve ever seen her unhappy was once when she was taken up for a nap. She was asleep the minute her head hit the pillow, so the tears didn’t last long.

 

If I Were Water and You Were Air

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The Prompt: For this week’s writing challenge, take on the theme of H2O. What does it mean to be the same thing, in different forms?
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If I Were Water and You Were Air

I used to be restless water—
only the froth and currents
of a moving life.

Now I am still water,
sinking down to where
I can be found
by anyone willing to stand quietly
and look.

Is it true that moving water never freezes?
Is it true that still waters run deep?
Is it true that we are wed in steam?

“What if, caught by air,
it never lets me go?” I ask.

“But even water
turned to air
must fall at last,” you say.

“And what if I fall farther from you?”
I say. “Or what if I never again find banks
that open to contain me?”

I used to be swift flowing water.
Now I am a pool that sinks me deeper every year.
So deep, so deep I sink
that on its way to find me,
even air may lose its way.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_writing_challenge/ice-water-steam/

Wallpaper

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This is an old poem I found in the bowels of my external hard drive. Reading it stirred up the squelched emotions of eight years ago; and although they are no longer felt so keenly, if at all, they still felt authentic. So here it is, rewritten and exposed to the eyes of the world for the first time:

Wallpaper

Clinging to the wall
like an old wallpaper scrap
are the words
I want you, I want you, I want you, I want you.

Their refrain slides up and down
the musical scale—
an old country tune,
plaintive and clear.

Why do I want you?

The first time I met you,
there was something about the curl of your hair.
Your eyes, so familiar­—puzzled, as though
you, too, were trying to remember.

After that, it was
the set of your shoulders—
the arm stretched between your seat and mine
with your hand on the back of my seat.

All of your restraint an aphrodesiac.

The truth is
that I pined
for two days after I left,
then went on with my life.

Still, that scrap
of wanting
comes up early in the morning
as I waken

and my mind walks,
looking for someone to pin it to,
and every time
it stops at you.

Cee’s Odd Ball Photo Challenge

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I think it is obvious why this picture naturally fell into the oddball category. I didn’t crop, wanting you to know I had the good sense not to be in the same room with this cranky old codger, who was 1500 miles away as he serenaded me.

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I don’t know why I find this picture oddball. Perhaps it is the “Mickey Mouse ears” on the little girl that are really the heads of two boys in the water, or the contrast of all the bobbing heads with the one boy stretched as far out of the water trying to catch the ball that was thrown by whom? Perhaps it just happened to be flying by like the pelicans that are above and out of view.

 

http://ceenphotography.com/cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge/

Blank Page

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The Prompt: All Grown Up—When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?

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Blank Page

It stretches forever in front of me.
There, no future happens until I create it.
And that is the power of words
that rub like pieces of gravel in my shoe.
I become less of a child in bearing them,
grow to adolescence as I pry them from my shoe.
In storing them on the page, I become my own creator—
writing a new world with each decision of word.
On the page, I can, if I so choose,
grow up again and again.
Each page filled or every edit of the last
becomes another part of me
that tells the same story:
that growing enough to fill the space inside of me
never happens.

 

WordPress Sunday Stills Photo Challenge: Legs!!!

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005 DSC00936 DSC00627 - Version 5 DSC01594  DSC01352  DSC01439     DSC00043 - Version 2DSC01173

You lust for legs not yet satiated?  look here: http://sundaystills.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/sunday-stills-the-next-challenge-legs/

I Can’t Resist

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For some reason I love this picture taken on my walk this Christmas morning when I had all these other things I “should” have been doing. “I didn’t come to the beach to do what I should or what I have always done before,” I told myself.  And I listened.  (That is how I lost the poem I’d just written but had not posted.)

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Click on photo for larger image.

Beachside houses were filled with beach visitors sleeping in on Christmas morning.  The beach was humming with the activity only of those who worked on Christmas. Vendors, waiters, boat tour operators, cooks, lifeguards, henna tattoo artists.  Whoever set up this beachside restaurant was doing it pristinely, but right, with a bit of a flair. The tide rolled in and baptized the table legs, but the napkins stayed as crisp as though starched.

Merry Christmas to all.

Lost Poem

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 Lost Poem

A button pushed.
No lives lost.
Just newborn words,
vanished
and mourned.

Consider them
a sacrifice to the muses,
he says.

Consider them
parts of me
I’ll never remember again,
I say.

I’d Give the World

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The Prompt: Secret Santa—You get to choose one gift — no price restrictions — for any person you want. The caveat? You have to give it anonymously. What gift would you give, and to whom?

I’d Give the World

I would give my niece, Stephanie, a trip around the world with the stipulation that it must last at least one year and that she needs to paint at least one painting in each place she visits and keep a journal of writing and sketches. If she wishes, she could take one friend with her.

The reason why I would give her this gift is because I believe the thing that had the biggest effect on my life was a 4 month long trip I took around the world in my junior year of college and the three years I spent traveling after I graduated from college. After a lifetime of saying this,  I’m going to try to analyze why this is so.

l.  It showed me life from a world perspective rather than merely a U.S. news view.  This is perhaps more possible in this age of the internet, but I had never heard the news from any perspective other than one slanted from the U.S. view.

2.  It showed me that everything is everywhere.  I met wise people who had never been to school and wealthy entrepreneurs who were the stupidest people I’d ever met. I experienced unbelievable greed and  I met the poorest of people who were the most generous in giving what they had. There were people the world over whose desire it was to learn what I knew and to teach what they knew.  I started to recognize people I knew in people I’d never met before. I experienced so many cultures—all of which seemed to be working when left alone without having other cultures thrust upon them.

3. I discovered that everyone in the world has somewhere they fit in.  Once you find this place, you can fit in anywhere.

4. I learned how to do without almost everything.  In doing so, I think I discovered what is most important.  (This may be hard for close friends, who know what a collector I am, to believe.)

5.  I learned that I am braver and smarter and craftier and more resilient than I ever would have believed.

6.  I learned that I am so fortunate to have been born where and when and to whom I was born.

7.  I learned that I can do anything I want to and be anyone I want to—and I chose me.

8. I discovered I can be totally on my own and get by fine.

9. I discovered talents I never knew I had.

10. I realized the broad range of choices I had in life.

I would wish all of these realizations on every young person.  Perhaps they all have a wider world open to them in this cyber world, but nothing beats real experience and I believe this is the best gift I can think of to give to a very special person in this world.