Tag Archives: Judy Dykstra-Brown

To Do

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To Do

Dust the knickknacks, mop the floor?
Both can be a dreadful chore.
Dishwashers call for loading dishes–
another task beyond my wishes.

Window-washing tires me out–
strains my back and makes me pout.
Washing clothes and ironing?
Cleaning ovens? Not my thing.

I could rave on,  task after task,
but a better question you might ask
as we survey chore after chore:
What is the job I don’t abhor?

Cleaning isn’t any fun.
That’s why I hire my housework done

 

The Prompt: Those Dishes Won’t Do Themselves–What’s the household task you most dislike doing? Why do you think that is — is it the task itself, or something more?

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/those-dishes-wont-do-themselves-unfortunately/

My Town

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Two Poetry readings at La Rueda Coffee House in San juan Cosala and of the “Not Yet Dead Poets” at the Old Posada.

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Shots from the Raquet Club in San Juan Cosala, where I live.

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A small town on a large lake about an hour from a large city. A few hours from the ocean. Lots of flowering trees.  Horses grazing. Mountains in the background.  Birds overhead. Dogs underfoot. People who care planning and maintaining reasonable rules so I don’t have to. A community swimming pool heated by natural hot springs two blocks away.  Lots of music, poetry, art, theater.  Friendly people open to invitation. Nearby geological and archeological features ready to explore.  Lots of secondhand stores. Open plazas with restaurants to sit in and watch others walk by.  Outdoor markets.  Organic markets. Weekly street markets.

A place where people sit on chairs in front of their houses at night to watch their neighbors walk by. An affordable place to live where someone else happy for the job mows my yard and trims my vines and waters my plants. A place where I can afford to hire someone else to clean my house for me while I do art and write.  A community where people are invested in helping others and both give their money and time to support orphanages, schools for kids, old folks homes and to give medical help for those in need.

A place with temperate weather where people smile and say “hola” or “adios” as you pass them on the street.  A place 45 minutes from a major airport where airplanes hardly ever fly over. Cattle. Raspberry fields. Corn fields. Pelicans. Fiestas. Saints Day processions. Dia de los Muertos. Fish restaurants. Taco stands. The best ice cream in the world. Arrechera. Chicken mocojetes verde. Burritos. Flautas. Chiles en Nogada. Rainy season. Virgin of Guadalupe celebrations.

I’ve found my almost perfect society. So why am I traveling elsewhere?  Because there were other idyllic places in my past that are a pleasure to revisit. Because one of the less than idyllic things about the town I’ve lived in for the past 14 years is that so many of my favorite people and relatives do not live there.  So I travel to California and Wyoming and Minnesota and Alabama and Maryland and Missouri and other parts of Mexico, but so far I have always returned home.

for videos go HERE  or HERE or HERE

The Prompt: Describe what you consider to be an idyllic community.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/idyllic/

Cee’s Black White Photo Challenge: Signs

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DSC06675DSC00496 - Version 3 DSC00495 - Version 2 DSC00495 - Version 3 DSC00382 - Version 2DSC06677DSC00036 - Version 2DSC00500 - Version 2All signs located in the San Francisco Bay area or in the Route 66 Museum near Times Beach, Missouri.

For more signs, see: http://ceenphotography.com/2015/04/30/cees-black-white-photo-challenge-signs/

One Word Photo Challenge: Sun

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Why is the sun most beautiful at its beginning and end?
With luck, the same is true of our lives

http://ceenphotography.com/2015/04/29/one-word-photo-challenge-sun/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/fearful-symmetry/

 http://jennifernicholewells.com/2015/04/28/one-word-photo-challenge-sun/

Each and Every: WordPress Fearful Symmetry and NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 30

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Each and Every

Each person is born to turn into a memory.
Every beginning is the beginning of an end.
Eerie the truths we start to face with time.

Earnest philosophers find a happy ending.
Elders will soon become the newly borne.
Eiderdown falls to rise again.

Either we believe this, or we spend
eternity trying to know it.
Every ending is also a beginning.

NaPoWriMo Prompt: Write a poem backwards. Start with the last line and work your way up the page to the beginning. Another way to go about this might be to take a poem you’ve already written, and flip the order of the lines and from there, edit it so the poem now works with its new order. (I selected the first alternative.)

WordPress Prompt: Fearful Symmetry—write a poem where every line begins with the same letter.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/fearful-symmetry/

Routes Laid Out by Heavenly Bodies

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Routes Laid Out by Heavenly Bodies

The road of the moon
on the water
is a bridge
between us
leading me
to our new self.

When I am ready
to return
to what I was
before you,
that road
has vanished

but the sun
lights a different
pathway
and sends my shadow
ahead like a door
I seek to enter.

The oldest moon,
the sun at its birth
or just before its death
create  in us
just the suggestion
of a road.

That is why we rise early
for the sunrise,
gather for the sunset,
spill old blood,
howl howl
at the open moon.

This poem meets both prompts today. The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem about a bridge. and the WordPress prompt was  “When the full moon happens, you turn into a person who is the opposite of who you normally are.  Describe this new you.”

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/the-full-moon/

Clerihew, Two-on-Two–NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 25

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Clerihew  Two-on-Two

The word is out that Geoffrey Chaucer
never bothered with a saucer,
for though he raised many a couplet,
he always held them fully uplet!

Some have charged Truman Capote
with writing that is too emotey.
but though he was no macho stud,
I know that he wrote in cold blood.

The prompt today was to write a clerihew. A clerihew has the following properties:

  • It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it mostly pokes fun at famous people
  • It has four lines of irregular length and metre (for comic effect)
  • The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English languages[2]
  • The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject’s name. According to a letter in the Spectator in the 1960s, Bentley said that a true clerihew has to have the name “at the end of the first line”, as the whole point was the skill in rhyming awkward names.[3]

Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous individuals and reposition them in an absurd, anachronistic or commonplace setting, often giving them an over-simplified and slightly garbled description (not unlike the schoolboy style of 1066 and All That). The unbalanced and unpolished poetic meter and line length parody the limerick, and the clerihew in form also parodies the eulogy.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/byobookworm/

The Magician: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 23

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The Prompt for NaPoWriMo was to choose a card & write a poem about it that applied to my life.  I chose to select a Tarot card at random. What came up was the Magician:

The Magician

Through what I choose and where I give in,
I create the world I live in.
If I’m a trickster, I trick myself
and lay my talents on a shelf.
Seize control and I gain the world,
all my inner self unfurled.
Magic’s not a thing without
or a thing to sell or flout.
It’s simply using the strength within
to play the game of life and win.

*

NaPoWriMo 2015, DAY 14: The Holy Apewoman of Mexico

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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.

*

High Noon With Emily Dickinson

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The Prompt: High Noon–At noon today, take a pause in what you’re doing or thinking about. Make a note of it, and write a post about it later.

As it happens, I couldn’t sleep last night and so didn’t actually fall asleep until 5:30 this morning.  Therefore, high noon found me signing on to the NaPoWriMo site to get my day’s assignment. So, at high noon, that’s what I was doing.  The results you may find HERE.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/high-noon/