Night Chorus
Village dogs out in the dark—
first they howl, and then they bark.
A filling moon spills from a cloud.
That’s when the dogs become so loud.
Each of my dogs is in his bed,
though they’d rather be outside instead.
My dogs and I silent and still
as outside voices speak their will.
The little burro brays consent.
Wind in the palms nodding assent.
I have my qualms about leaving Morrie and Diego out all night to converse with the neighbors. I spoil all their fun!!!
Sad News for the Bearded Lady
That your girlish form is rather cute
is not a fact we would dispute;
and though you’re held in good repute,
yet every male’s lack of pursuit
from callow youth to crusty coot
is a subject that is moot.
The men would be more resolute—
more determined to press their suit—
if only you were less hirsute!
The prompt today was “pursue.”
It is the difference between that present handed to you by a person who says, “It’s only a tie,” and a package under the tree squeezed and prodded at—perhaps a corner loosened or a hole poked in through supposed accidental handling, pondered like a good detective show. Who wants these mysteries revealed before their time? What value in the present whose contents you already know for sure?
The magic of Christmas for some is that faith that the girl, untouched by human lover, gave birth—and it is that sort of faith that “saved” the world. If we knew the whole truth of that story would all it prompted fall into the hole covered all these years by mystery? The whole world seems to be standing more on what we don’t know than on what we absolutely know empirically—what we can prove.
Unexposed
And so I look at the picture of my young mother
in her cotton housedress and saddle shoes
holding her baby in front of her in her stroller,
whole contraption, child and carrier,
a foot or two above the ground,
and there is mystery in the reveal.
I do not hear what transpired to cause this pose––
whether my father caught her carrying me
from the porch to sidewalk and said,
“Here, Tootie, turn around,” and snapped the picture,
or whether my older sister planned the pose.
Perhaps some movie star was snapped in a similar scene
and my mother and sister, like two conspiring fans,
planned the shot to steal the glamor formerly reserved
for “Photoplay” or “Look” or “Life.”
There would be no reel-to-reel
in any normal person’s life for years.
No movie camera to tell me exactly what my mother and I were like
before my memory took hold and even then,
what I remember of childhood is
more like reflections in a lake that color and change
depending on the clouds or rain,
distorting the light like moods.
My Aunt Peggy’s house,
always remembered as feeling like
the color chartreuse,
and I will never know why––
that smell of a friend’s house that became associated
with her memory more than any concrete proof of
the spinning film of a movie projector.
I do not know my mother’s voice at thirty.
I did not witness myself since birth
by either sound or sight.
There is a different mystery
to a past caught
in boxes of Kodacolor prints
curling and yellowing in a closet
than one documented like a science experiment
with every event taped and filmed.
Where does the mystery of you reside when you see yourself
so clearly, as others have seen you all along?
What does it leave for you to try to discover?
No tapes.
No film.
No Internet.
No Skype.
No YouTube.
No home movies.
All of our pasts were once wrapped up forever
with only our fingers poking in the edges.
Only our voices asking,
“What was it like the day when I was born?”
What do you remember about the day when. . . .?
(This is a rewrite of a poem I wrote three years ago.)
What Is of Value
Now that the grass is freshly mown,
the sparrows can’t leave it alone.
Though we prefer the lovely green,
they prefer what’s gone unseen.
The dry grass underneath is best
for weaving into this year’s nest.
What has value for you and me
is not the same for all, you see.
For the way the world’s devised
is that everything is prized.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to compose a poem out of overheard conversations, but since I’ve been in a solitary mood lately, I went down to eavesdrop on the birds and other sounds of nature. Hearing a loud chirping in the huge cactus near my hammock, I noticed birds making repeated trips to the planter full of grass I put near the pool so my Scottie dog Morrie could have a place to lie to drop his tennis ball into the pool for me to retrieve and throw back down into the garden for him to chase after. The long grass was pretty, but constantly being torn off by his repeated jumps up to and down from the planter and making a mess in the pool, so I’d had the gardener trim the grass. Earlier, I’d noted how ugly it now was as the grass underneath had turned brown, but upon closer observation, I realized that it was now a treasure trove for birds building nests.
full moon morning, jdbphoto2017
4 A.M.
It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.
The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to use alliteration. This is quiet alliteration, like the poem. Not too much. Just a touch!
Capital Punishment
She fancies herself a raconteur while others find her boring.
Just when they should be laughing, too often they are snoring.
The topics that she chooses are usually wrong,
and the details she finds scintillating just strung out too long.
When she speaks in public, the chairs empty out fast.
Even sell-out audiences simply do not last.
She could have done much better if she’d studied elocution,
As it is, her listeners vote for electrocution.
Prompt: write a poem that looks at the same thing from various points of view. http://www.napowrimo.net/day-six-5/
Body Language
When words don’t translate, actions do,
and folks are always reading you.
Though you watch what you may say,
more information, day-by-day,
is given by the way you act;
so use a little care and tact.
There’s a language written on your face
that’s understood most any place.
In Des Moines or Timbuktu,
it’s the one you take along with you.
The prompt today was translate.
Devastation Station
Our beautiful world licks her wounds
and limps around us, twirling her skirts
to blow dry dust, then empties her wash water
in deluges that flush away even more.
Not content with the bounty she provides,
they gauge her skin and pick her scabs,
feeding her poison every day.
Rich men lauded for their tax-deductible charity, get richer
by purloining more of the earth’s bounties
that they call their own.
Super yachts and super models
give testimony to their greatness,
obscuring lurid details
of their journeys to success.
Their trophy wives marry desolation,
then furnish it themselves ever after—
future alimony little enough reward
for the sale of life and dignity.
The social pages full of the same old story—
old men professing their virility
by photos taken with presidents and starlets.
They reillustrate their own lives with
records of success on study walls,
like rich wallpaper obscuring scars
they’ve left around them in the world.
Hiding stories of devastation
the world keeps choosing
to reward them for.
The prompt word today was “devastation.”
I first visited the lovely little fishing village of Cadaqués, Spain, with my friends Patty and Judy. We loved the place, which at the time was the home of Salvador Dali. When I returned there a few years later with the man who would within the year become my husband, he was equally charmed and our expected one-night stay swelled into four. The only marring detail was the black ash that blanketed the town, blown in from the miles of cork trees that had been burned in a flash fire earlier that year. This ash covered a patio table table recently cleaned off within an hour. Nonetheless, it was a lovely unspoiled village and we enjoyed watching the fishing boats go out in the morning and return at night and bathing in the warm Mediterranean. When I saw the prompt “Scorched,” the image of those hills covered in blackened trees came immediately to mind. Unfortunately, I’m not at home right now so can’t publish an appropriate photo.
Uncorked
Cork trees grotesque in the Spanish sun,
scorched not by it, but one by one
caught by fire that stripped their skin
and then consumed that thing within
that forms the plug that seals our wine
and thus preserves fruits of the vine
for wintry nights–for tongue and lip
to savor every ruby sip.
Nature can be a surly thug
vandalizing nature’s plug
and thus we’re forced to man’s creation
to solve a vintner’s consternation.
These synthetics made of plastic
are neither natural nor elastic.
They do not breathe or swell or stain,
or decompose in sun or rain.
And yet when nature chose to burn
those hills of oak, it lost its turn.
What nature might choose to take from us,
will be replaced with little fuss
by hand of man who knows it all.
And thus began Adam’s first fall!
The prompt word today is “scorched.”
At First
Days were not over half so soon
when we ate passion with a spoon.
Swirled chocolate at the Frosty Freeze
melting in the prairie breeze
hot and redolent of soil—
chaff of wheat and rattled coil.
Summer days and summer nights,
rolls in grass and water fights
with uncoiled hoses, cooking pans,
rolled up cuffs and soaked white Vans.
Passion then was not so much
a thing of kissing or of touch
as of smells and sights and taste.
Baking beans and paper paste.
Brand new tablets, pencil shavings.
Summer nights, then autumn cravings.
Cattle lowing, school bells,
Cool spring water from deep wells.
Throats that ached from drinking it,
brought to light from ancient pit.
All these simple remembered things
that thinking about passion brings:
spin-overs on the monkey bars,
rides on bikes and naming stars.
It’s true some passion rides on night
with pressing lips and gentle bite,
or trembles on the fingertips
straying over breasts or hips.
Yet simpler loves bring lesser rations
of what adults consider passions.
Words like passion must be allowed
to be unfettered, like a cloud
and not confined in connotation,
dictionary or denotation.
Sometimes passion can be bright—
A meadowlark or soaring kite.
Sun-chapped lips just touched with mist
long before they’re ever kissed.
The prompt word today was “Passionate.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 