Tag Archives: poem

Summer Evenings Turn to Fall for Blast from the Past!

3 Replies

WP has started sending out notices every day of all the blogs we have done on the same date (In this case, June 20) for the entire time we’ve been blogging.  In my case, I had posted 36 blogs on that date during the past 10 years. I’m sharing the oldest one, published in 2016.

Summer Evenings Turn to Fall

9 Replies

daily life color168 (1)

Summer Evenings Turn to Fall

Back when we drank summer through paper soda straws,
we played at being cowboys, hiding out in draws
that we imagined wilder. Our hearts beat with fear
of fictional opponents who might be drawing near.

We had no euphemisms for our enemies.
We only knew our fear of them, silent, on our knees.
Little did we know then, during childhood games,
imaginary enemies would assume other names.

No ditch big enough to hide, and no night dark enough.
No more cops and robbers. No more blind man’s bluff.
Strange that in those peaceful times the games we chose to play
were a mere foreshadowing of what is real today.

Back when summer filled our cheeks with melons and with berries,
why didn’t we fill balmy nights with princesses and fairies?
Back when life was summer smooth, we lusted after roughness,
as though we’d gain maturity through violence and toughness.

Feigning valor not yet gained, we knew not that tomorrow
we’d have the fears we’d feigned for real––the terror and the sorrow.
Childhood evenings filled with shouts and laughter interspersed
were in reflection adult games that we just rehearsed.

 

The picture is my sister Patti and her best friend Karen.  Note the real saddle placed on the makeshift “horse.”  

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/summer/

Reblog: “Entrapment” Poem from 2017 and New Podcast Commentary

18 Replies

DSC00500

Entrapment

The city lights are tempting–each theater and store,
but when my outer life is rich, my inner life’s a bore.
Do I want to create my life or should it create me?
And which is which?  I do not know. Which helps me most to be?
I guess I need a balance, but each choice is a trap.
While I think it over, perhaps I’ll have a nap.
Sometimes the truth is found in dreams. Perhaps that will work now.
But once the “what” occurs to me, I’ll have to dream the “how.”
I dream empty buildings and abandoned avenues,
stores filled with pretty dresses, refrigerators, shoes.
Wind through broken windows and grass through broken walks.
All those empty radios where no one ever talks.
While somewhere in the country, away from smog and fumes
those busy cities of the past are sealed away in rooms
writing morning pages and playing with their dogs,
recording things they used to do in their daily blogs.
If I don’t join the city, if I choose to be free,
perhaps the busy city will choose to come join me!

IMG_0745

I don’t recall who sent me this podcast, or how. Could it be AI? If you’d like you can listen to it here:

(Please let me know if this podcast link doesn’t work. I’ve been wrestling with it for hours now!)

Last-Minute Menu Changes

9 Replies

Last-Minute Menu Changes

My ravenous cats lurk up on the roof
while my dogs all remind me in language of woof
that they’re hollow with hunger and rattled by need
of kibble and catfood to fulfill their greed
for something to fill up space found in their tummies:
chicken or beef or those jerky stick yummies.
Now the dogs rush the door in their need to be seen,
push open the glass door  and rattle the screen.
With a flicker of tail, they crash once and again
into the door screen ’til they have slipped in,
and both dogs and cats leap onto my bed,
shaming their mom, whose face has turned red
with embarrassment over the fact she forgot
to go shopping for food for the whole furry lot!
So I leap from my bed and run down the hall,
pursued by my dogs and my cats, one and all.
Run into the kitchen and throw open the door
of the fridge, then I spread out all over the floor
the food I’d intended to feed to a guest
whom I had invited with all of the rest
of his family to dine–the roast and the cheese
I had purchased because I knew it would please
all my guests–the potatoes and veggies and flan
and I watched all my animals lick every pan
until it was empty of every food scrap,
then they lay on the floor for an after-meal nap
while I wandered in and climbed into my bed
to try to decide what I’d feed instead
to those guests who’d arrive in just 4 hours more.
Then I dressed and departed to drive to the store
to buy frozen pizzas and ice cream and cake
out of which a quick meal I’d return home and make,
shooing out of the kitchen those pets now sedated
once their fierce hunger was finally  abated.
The floor now licked clean, it was one task the less
I’d have to complete. They’d cleaned up their own mess!
So I mixed up a salad and set a fine table
and completed the meal as best I was able.
Poured tequila, cooked pizza and uncorked the wine.
The guests were well-pleased and my pets lay supine
both on terrace and roof or snug in their beds
while visions of roast beef careened through their heads.
And lest you wonder, I’ll say one thing more.
I bought kibble and cat food while there at the store!

 

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 751, the prompt words are: ravenous lurked shame space found glass hollow flicker rattled slip red crash

For dVerse Poets, Jan 6, 2026

39 Replies

Down in Grandma’s Cellar

Sleeping over at Grandma’s, her rooms all stuffed with treasure
there for my explorations, their pillaging my pleasure.
The barn so full and shadowed with pigeons, mice and more,
I did not venture farther than to peek in through the door.
But the basement was forbidden, so I overcame my fear.
To test my new maturity, I had to venture near.

Down in Grandma’s cellar, I could not see the stars.
There weren’t any planets like Jupiter or Mars.
But still it was as dark as night. The light from one mere candle
seemed the only light the ghosts who lived down there could handle.
As I creaked down the ladder rungs, glass rattled on the shelves
as though the time-dulled canning jars told stories on themselves.

Rhubarb on the nearest shelves, peaches in the back.
Watermelon pickles seemed poised for the attack,
swaying on the upper shelves, dusted by the years.
I gathered up my courage, pushing down my fears.
So many eyes caught in the dark––glassy gleaming sprites
waiting there to satisfy the family’s appetites.

But no one came to gather them and spread them on a plate.
The waste of it was senseless—their empty, useless fate.
How many hours she’d labored to gather nature’s fruit.
How many other hours used up in the pursuit
of washing, peeling, cutting, and packing them in glass,
packing them in cauldrons and boiling them en masse.

Where did the hungry mouths go? Why did they go untasted?
What happened all those years ago that their richness was wasted?
Accustomed to the secrets kept hidden behind blinds,
we kids retained the questions that stirred our tiny minds.
So many of these mysteries lie hidden in my past.
Remarkable how long their spreading shadows seem to last.

 

For dVerse Poets  our prompt was to use 3 poems by Elizabeth Bishop as examples colored by our own poetic voice to take the reader to a place, a person and an occasion, incorporating  accuracy of detail, spontaneity, immediacy and mystery to write our own original poem. 

“Abundance” for dVerse Poets

8 Replies

Abundance

How can we approach “abundant”
without resorting to “redundant?”
We must simply have the gall
to search for the original
instead of coming in the door
with something we have bought before––
like “Beanie Babies” by the score.

What if, everywhere we went,
we looked for something different?
So when we chose a friend anew,
they had a different point of view?
From countryside or town or city,
be it huge or itty-bity––
just choose someone you find witty

and mine their mind for something new
that can grow a part of you
that’s different from what came before––
that can open up a door
within your heart, within your mind
of that place where you can find
beliefs of a matching kind.

For dVerse Poets prompt: Abundant

( I know I’m not supposed to be blogging. The dVerse Devil made me do it…_

Wild Nights Out, For the Weekly Writer’s Workshop

4 Replies

IMG_1639
Wild Nights “Out”

When we are young we brag and flout
our exciting evenings out,
but later on the joys of gin
start to wear our patience thin.
Lately, though I still go dancing,
I find an hour or two of prancing
is quite enough to slake my thirst;
and I must confess the worst.
When it comes to nights of sin,
my most exciting nights are “in!”

For the Weekly Writer’s Workshop, the prompt is “Wild.”

The Combiners, for Word of the Day, Sept 7, 2025

4 Replies

Since I have written around 4,000 poems for this blog, I have lately started searching to see how many of the prompt words have been used in an earlier poem. I couldn’t resist doing so for  “sundae,”  thinking this might be the one word I’d never used before, but it actually came up in 4. This is the one I chose:

 Sixteen!! The Combiners (Excerpt)

This is an excerpt from a longer narrative poem in my book, Prairie Moths.  It is the final section of  “The Combiners” –a poem about the itinerant workers who would drive up from Oklahoma each summer to harvest the wheat crop in South Dakota. This infusion of fresh young men into a town of just 700 people was, of course, exciting to teenaged girls whose own male classmates were a bit immature. Not that any of us ever did anything about it.  Imagining and talking was enough for us at the age of sixteen!

combiners dance

The Combiners

I saw him first on the bleachers
on the other side of the floor.
As dancers came together and parted,
I saw him and then didn’t see him.
After the music stopped, I craned my neck
around the legs that stood in front of me,
trying to see him across the cleared dance floor.

Then the voice at the top of the legs
asked me to dance, and I looked up–at him.
Feeling uncertain, wicked and wild,
I answered yes.

I’d served him once or twice
at Restaurant 16–
that highway-fronting restaurant
as exotic as its name.
I knew he was working the Weston place
with an outfit my dad had never used.
He liked his steak well-done,
French dressing, no tomatoes.
Butterscotch sundaes made him cough.
Over the water pitcher and order pad,
we had traded a look or two.
I knew he wore Old Spice
and drank Cokes with breakfast,
but I didn’t know his name.

When we got to the dance floor,
he took my hand,
put his other hand on my damp waist.
It was a slow dance and the night was hot.
The dance was work.
I was awkward–too inhibited to get as intimate
as following in dancing requires.
Over the music, we tried to shout our names,
tried to find a mutual rhythm,
finally giving up both endeavors
to dance the slow song, not touching,
moving our arms in fast song 60’s style
to the slow song rhythms.

When the music stopped,
he walked me back again
to the bleacher
he had plucked me from,
reinserted me into the correct space in the line of girls,
smiled, and walked away.

My friends closed around me
like a sensitive plant
to hear the news.
I watched his back,
blue short-sleeved shirt,
his pressed Levis
and his cowboy boots.
I watched the Oklahoma swing of his hips–
danger on the hoof.
He wouldn’t ask me to dance again,
yet, his sun-blackened arms,so finely muscled,
had held me for a minute or two.
His bleached blue eyes
had seen something of worth in me.
He had asked my name, touched my waist,
and walked me off the dance floor.
And, since this was as spicy
as any of our stories would likely be
all summer long,
I turned to my friends to tell the tale.

The Word of the Day prompt is “Sundae.”

Our Emperor’s New Clothes, for the Weekly Challenge, Aug 23, 2025

36 Replies

Our Emperor’s New Clothes

How do we mentor our burgeoning youth
in these times of unequalled stretchings of truth?
Teach them to sort out these rash acts of treason,
to approach them with heart and strain them through reason.
Teach them hating is wrong and exclusion is selfish—
that plastic’s destroying our coral and shellfish.
That medical care should be something for all
and that hoarding of wealth brings a country’s last fall.

Teach them the future is theirs to decide.
Teach them the truth of whom to deride.
Teach them that facts being taught by their teachers
may rival what they’re being taught by some preachers
and those who would rule to win their own gain,
lining their pockets again and again
with tax cuts that only extend to the rich
while the trickle-down theory develops a hitch.

Teach them to sort out rhetoric from fact.
Teach them to care and to vote and to act
to stretch out the privilege to blanket us all.
We are not alone on this spinning great ball.
Our former meddling and incredible gall
is why we’re considering building a wall
to keep out the hungry and frightened downtrodden
who come to us weary, exhausted and sodden.

They ask for asylum and our protection
from dictators who have prompted defection
much as many Americans are fleeing south
to avoid the stupidity and the vile mouth
of the dictator who is now ruining our land
with illogical thinking and truth that is canned.
Who will mentor whom in this crazy new world
once the last hateful invectives are hurled?

Our world has been sold out for profit and gain—
overseen by leaders opportunistic and vain.
Perhaps it’s our youth who will now mentor us
to sort out the truth from this internet fuss.
As in the old legend, They’ll teach the uncouth
to forsake propaganda for naked truth.
It’s hoped that our youth wake us up from our doze
to point out the truth of our Emperor’s new clothes!!

 

The Weekly Challenge Weekend prompt is “burgeoning.”

“Hairlooms” for Cellpic Sunday

10 Replies

 

I know.. weird photo…I just like it.  I took it to accompany a poem I was planning to put on Youtube along with an oral reading of the below poem from my soon-to-be published book, If I Were Water and You Were Air. I am reconsidering even doing the audio posting of poems on youtube, so will make use of it here and include the poem as an explanation of the photo.

Long Weekend

Her shoes on the floor next to the pot-bellied stove
do not have holes in them, as her father said,
but rather triangles and rectangles
and everyone is wearing them
laced up to below the ankle.
Her friend Marjorie, who has lots of shoes,
has pink ones
and Sheryl has a white pair
and even my new stepdaughter’s real mother
has shoes like this.

Her used Band-Aid lies in fetal position
on the new white sofa cushion,
her hair twister on the kitchen counter
along with a handful of pens she grabbed from my desk
and then abandoned.
Her clothes, like crumbs of her,
lie scattered down the hall.

She is asleep in the loft of my study,
in the nest she has chosen
for a place to stash herself, along
with those collected objects of my past
that have captured her fancy as she helped
with our unpacking of boxes.
With them, she has created a little world within our world:
a painted blown egg from the Tucson street fair,
assorted brushes and antique hair rollers,
hair combs I bought in Peking, African baskets to put them in,
a beach chair, a sheepskin rug, and her stuffed dog.

Stealing into my study to find paper and my one remaining pen,
I hear her gentle snores from the high space
at the top of the ladder on the wall behind my desk.
My new daughter––with us for our first weekend
as we open boxes in our new house.

The bouquet of wildflowers on the bookcase––
California poppies, creeping Jenny, sprays of honeysuckle––
she has learned all their names, along with moss roses, aloe vera and lobelia,
collecting them in her sorties out to the deck
to scare away the jays, feed peanuts to the squirrels.

She loves this house and wanted to unpack one more box
before bedtime––my bathroom box that held handy hair rubbers
and the tiny Chinese combs––both of them speedily added to her purloined collection.

She calls me Mom, her knee sticking through her Christmas tights.
She is a girl I can’t keep together––
already a hole in the turquoise top we bought together yesterday––
four tops, four pairs of tights
and a pink jacket.
Socks, next visit.

When she leaves to go back home, I plant dahlias and purple salvia.
I find the hidden box of toothbrush, toothpaste, and acne medicine
she has secreted in her loft above as though staking her claim.
I find cups to put them in,
put them on the counter in the bathroom next to ours.

For Cellpic Sunday

Dining Alone, for Fandango’s Flashback Friday, July 18, 2025

10 Replies

For Fandango’s Flashback Friday, we were asked to reblog a blog written on a previous July 18. This one was first published on July 18, 2018

DSC07819

Dining Alone at the Maria Bonita Restaurant Bar

Señor Garcia is smoking today.
Below him,
Maria Phoenix lies on satin sheets
on the wall of Maria Bonita Restaurant Bar.

DSC07822

It is a small palapa restaurant––soft orange front with
hot pink trim–– that I’ve driven by hundreds of times before;
and every time, I’ve wanted to come in, but haven’t.
Now today, suddenly,
I don’t want to go home
and so my car turns in across the carretera.

DSC07818

I am the lone customer.
The cook and waiter
spring to action.
Totopos for him to bring,
a fire for her to light.
This is a fish restaurant
and I am a non-fish
eater, choosing between
quesadillas and beans
or a hamburger and fries.
Needless to say, I’m not here for the food.

I am here for the view and the limits
imposed by eating alone in an otherwise empty
restaurant/bar. I have a poem to write
and need the discipline imposed by a place
where there’s nothing else to do.
My only distraction is the view,
which forms the subject of my poem
and so is anything but a distraction.

DSC07823

The smoke from a dozen fires
rises into the air from the entire eastern slope
of Mount Garcia across the lake.
Whether by accident or by the hand of farmers
lighting fires to clear last year’s stubble from the fields,
the effect is that this extinct volcano
has somehow come to life,
springing leaks.

Fanned by a recent wind, the smoke grows denser, rises higher.
Below the slopes, a patchwork quilt of strawberry and raspberry
fields, covered with plastic sheets,
spawn fruit for the tables of El Norte.

Maria, that other smoldering beauty, lies suspended all around me––
long canvas banners reflecting her screen loves and her roles.
She looks over one shoulder, wears a rebozo or a mariachi’s sombrero.
Cantinflas, that beloved clown, shares her wall but is never in a shot with her.
They are opposites: the sexual symbol and the comic. One raises tension
and the other seeks to dispel it.

Maria Phoenix

I am in between, a mere observer, I know.
In every case it’s likely that the fire has been lit by means unnatural,
but nonetheless, it ignites my imagination.
I am surrounded by it.
“Blue Bayou” plays on the sound system.
Sleepy eyes.
My eyes sting from the smoke
that has filtered toward me
from eight miles or so across the lake.
The tears in my eyes are from the smoke,
not from memories of the departed one
I used to come with to these fish restaurants.

They are not the place for gringos.
Word is out about the sanitation
or where the fish comes from
or who might be encountered here.
A few restaurants down, there was a cartel killing
just about a year ago––perhaps more, perhaps less.
At any rate, Americanos and Canadians are rarely found here.

Today, no one else is found here.
“There’s no exception to the rule”
plays on the sound system.
“Everybody plays the fool.”
Feeling a stranger in the place where I live
is a feeling pleasurable to me––
an emotion I do not feel foolish for pursuing.

The waiter, as though I’m a repeat customer,
brings an entire bucket of ice
and fills my glass each time he passes.
They have my brand of rum.

DSC07821

I have always known this place could be my place.
The pleasure of knowing it to be so warms me
as much as the second jigger of rum.
Shall he pour it for me? Do I want it all?
Just half, I tell him, and fill the glass with Coke.
I like it weaker, so I can spread it out.
Like the fire.

Smoldering.