Click on Photos to Englarge.
For Cellpic Sunday
These photos were all taken from my patio and pool between the hours of 7:35 and 8:54 on Saturday, June 8, 2024. I couldn’t resist including the one where the moon looks like it is sitting on the electric pole.
Moonshadows
They lie on the surface without sinking in.
All around them is darkness that does not soak into them.
The moon causes but does not shape them.
What shapes them is what you have chosen to surround yourself with.
Trees or perhaps tall horses that stand unflinching in the moonlight,
making patterns of themselves on the front of your world.
Moonshadows are not the moon.
They are just a hint of it, altered by what comes between them.
Moon shadows are not today what they were yesterday.
They change every night and pull you along with them.
They filter out light but show you precisely where it is by its absence.
Moon Pie
When the moon is full
and everything ripe on the vine
I must have pie
juice running from the crisp crust
vanilla ice cream clouding its surface like clouds over the moon.
I bite into the piece like a slice of the moon..
like swiss cheese on apple pie.
slice of the moon.
moon pie.
For dVerse Poets “Stepping Out of the World” Photo by John McKaveney: Bright Moon.
Go HERE to see how others responded to the prompt.
How exciting. My poetry is going to the moon in the Polaris time capsule!!!
(Click on the first photo to read the details.)
What is most ironic is that this is a poem I read at the reading at the Nueva Posada today. The synchronicity of later receiving a message that my poems were going to the moon is just too much to overlook:
A question posed by one writer can often serve to provoke an answer by another. So it is in this poem, written seven years ago which is an answer to a question asked by Joan Barfoot in her book Luck.
What happens to someone like her as she gets older?
–from Luck, by Joan Barfoot
Answered
She loses her balance, starts to fall.
Once in the kitchen, three times in the hall.
Finds it harder to remember, spends more time alone.
Speaks her mind more freely, less likely to atone.
She starts attracting cats that come inside and do not leave.
Wears frays in her clothing–hemline, neckline, sleeve.
Starts forgetting passwords–sometimes the names of friends.
Her search for keys and glasses never really ends.
Starts waking in the nighttime to contemplate her death.
At midnight, has to go outside to try to catch her breath.
Counts the years before her instead of those behind.
She could live to one hundred if fate is being kind.
Will she live her last years with sister, lover, friend;
or will animal companions help her meet her end?
Will anybody mourn her? Does she want them to?
Will she be remembered by a poem or two?
Will anybody read her after she is dead?
Will all her future poetry die here in her head?
Will her blog named “lifelessons” finally cease to be?
Will they give the name away for a modest fee?
Will they erase her blog spot, burn her files of poems?
Cause a glut on EBay of her leftover tomes?
If she sells a book or two every other year
where will Amazon send the money when she isn’t here?
One day in the future in three thousand two
will Zee, (some bored teenager, with nothing else to do)
go onto the internet connected to her head,
close her eyes and throw herself backwards on her bed
and stumble on an errant line that floats through cyberspace,
and Google it to try to find its author, time and place?
“What happens to someone . . . ?” are the words that Zee has found.
Her fingers start to twitch as she is driven to expound.
The printer prints the words she says without her further action.
Tied into her speech and thought–spontaneous reaction.
” . . . like her as she gets older?” is printed on the wall.
For there’s no paper in the world. No paper left at all!
Her face is flushed, her eyes dilate, her eyes first squint, then blink.
This random line floating in space has provoked her to think.
First she’ll finish cyber school, then link her living pod
with a blowout sort of guy with a gorgeous bod.
They’ll make links with other blogs and party with their friends
for a couple hundred years before they meet their ends.
She thinks back on the interbrain to look for thoughts and links.
Lets her mind go soft as into cybermind she sinks.
Looking for her future job. She knows it’s there to see.
Time being just a concept to wander through for free.
She plops onto a webpage from two thousand fifteen,
all the information still there and easily seen.
The line Zee thought jumps out at her. She sees it’s not her own.
It’s been used two times before and now it seems it’s flown
into her thoughts to sort her out and give her a direction.
As she reads on, she catches on to this writer’s inflection
in every word she writes and when she gets to the post’s end,
she goes on reading through her life and starts to make a friend.
After two days of reading, she winds up at the start
knowing every detail in this blogger’s heart.
Then she goes back to where she started and sees her doubts and fears.
It’s then that she fast-forwards to the blogger’s final years
and sees the truth of everything that’s going to transpire.
The failing health, the hopeful mood, the ad, “Wanted to Hire
an interesting friend to talk to while I fall asleep.
One capable of caring and thoughts that wander deep.
Someone to be there some nights when it seems that I might leave
for one last time this life that’s loosening its warp and weave.
No heavy lifting needed—a weighted thought or two
is all that I find necessary. Weighing thoughts will do.”
Zee zoomed back to the entry that had drawn her thoughts at first.
The very sentence that had caused her gloomy thoughts to burst.
January was the month and 14 was the day
The year 2015, when she’d been the first to say
those fateful words and now Zee, too, was thinking just the same–
moving to the comments to add her words and name.
“Dear Lifelessons,” she’d say to her, and then add her assurance
that everafter she would be her safety and insurance
that she would never die alone or be bereft of friend
for Zee was vowing here and now she’d be there at the end.
She’d looked ahead and so she knew that she would keep this pledge.
She’d known the center of this life and now she knew its edge.
She knew the dates that she’d be needed in the years ahead.
She made a list and filed it in a clear spot in her head.
And then she went on thinking what those words meant in her life.
Would she be a scholar, an actress and a wife?
Would she produce children and would they be there for her?
That sentence found in cyberspace created quite a stir.
But all her dreams it prompted came true enough, what’s more
she kept her date with Lifelessons in 2044.
–Judy Dykstra-Brown, Lifelessons, 2015
Thanks, Lady Nyo, for giving me the news that our poems were going to the moon! Below is a link to her blog.
https://ladynyo.wordpress.com/2022/09/02/our-poetry-moon-bound/
Click on photos to increase size.
Moonlight Reflection
The radiant moon invites me to meander to the pool.
To miss its cloud-scrimmed drama would reveal me as a fool.
Its flickering light reflected in the pool’s steaming glass,
I part its even surface asunder as I pass.
Clothed in liquid light, I walk a smooth straight line,
reflectively immersed in this world that is all mine.
I have no other idol except this ghost of moon.
I feel that I could taste it if I only had a spoon.
Its taste would be ambrosial upon my earthly tongue—
the first to taste a lunar menu formerly unsung.
I bundle up my prayers and toss them overhead,
leaving all my worries unthought of and unsaid.
The stone steps lead me up again from its steaming mass
and I shed off moonlight around me as I pass.
I take its memory with me as I return to bed,
the splendor of the moonlight forever in my head.
Today’s prompt words are: reflective radiant immersed meander idol line taste drama ghost flickering stone. The photos I took two weeks ago before leaving my house to travel to the states for my school reunion. A glorious scene. One of the shots is the moon and trees reflected in the surface of my pool that is fed by hot mineral springs that pass through the magma layer fed by the Colima Volcano, 80 miles away. I swim in it almost nightly.
For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 562
First Night at the Beach
Harvest Moon
Peeking in the window,
blanketing our dreams,
It is a welcome harvest moon
whose straight and narrow beams
filter through our window blinds,
bathing us with light,
coming once again
to fulfill its yearly rite—
a calm and soothing presence
that mitigates the night.
The night turned cool and I was about to arouse myself from my hammock to go up to the house when I caught sight of the moon.
Click on photos to enlarge,
Click on the first photo to enlarge all.
I just couldn’t stop taking photos of the moon on this night of a full lunar eclipse. These may not be the best shots, but I was out there for two hours and I’m soooo sleepy. Strangely, this poem I posted earlier this year to one of Mark’s prompts popped up with the photos in my media file when I posted them. Don’t know how its link got recorded as a jpeg nor how it got here, but it seems to want to be posted again, so here it is:
Lucid Moon
With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––
I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a nightly lucid interlude.
When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.
Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.
Matt’s prompt today was “Lucidity.” The common meaning of “Lucid” is “clearly expressed” or “easy to understand,” but another meaning is “bright or luminous.”
This is for Marilyn–not a poem! Written over three years ago, it predated the “Me too” movement, but fits right in with the climate today of”one step forward, one step back.” Which will it be by the end of this political “reign”? Hopefully, if a woman winds up on the moon it will be literally and not figuratively.
For Ragtag’s “Moon” prompt.
“To the Moon, Alice!”
On “The Honeymooners,” Ralph Kramden (played by Jackie Gleason) had a phrase that those of us of a certain age can’t help but remember. “To the moon, Alice, to the moon!” he would rasp at his wife (played by the inimitable Audrey Meadows) whenever he had no less predictable comeback to her never predictable jibes. Of course, the idea was that this was how far he would knock her. An upraised fist often accompanied his threat.
The audience, of course, would roar. So hilarious this empty threat, for America knew that Ralph would never make good on the threat. Even Alice never flinched–supposedly because she, too, knew those words signaled an empty threat. But underneath those words and the fact that viewers found them to be so hilarious, was the idea that such threatened violence was funny–and, somehow, that such treatment of his wife was a…
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Please click on the first photo to enlarge all and really see the difference between these shots of the moon all taken within two minutes of each other.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 