Tag Archives: Judy Dysktra-Brown

NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 8–Palinode Poem

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!

Silvestre

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.