Tag Archives: poem

Don’t Pick the Daisies (For Sadje’s Spring Flower Prompt), Oct 23, 2024

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See poem below flower collage. (All photos by jdb. Please click on first photo to enlarge all.)

Don’t Pick the Daisies

Please leave those daisies in their wrapper.
I find them just too pert and dapper.
I prefer a floral decoration
prone to promote excitation.
I’d choose something a little queer
to be used as a boutonniere.
Yes, I agree, daisies are cute
but aren’t held in good repute
for inclusion in bouquets exotic.
They aren’t sufficiently chaotic.
All their little petals are spread
in order. They are too well-bred.
I like my flowers with frisky sproutings,
curling ‘rounds and sticking-outings––
birds of paradise well hung
with orange feathers and bright blue tongue.
I admit, I am a binger
on passionflower and wild ginger,
on orchid and bromeliad.
Daisies I find a little sad––
too Doris Day and sixtyish.
A bit of odd is what I wish
for when I choose to pick a flower
for an arrangement or a bower.
Give me heliconia,
proteus or begonia.
For an occasion that is formal,
daisies, dear, are just too normal.

For my mother Pat who liked her food plain and her flowers exotic. XOXOXO

For Sadje’s prompt: Fall Leaves or Spring Flowers

Cold-Hearted, Short Little Prompt Poem

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 I woke up to this prompt from Forgottenman:
No friggin’ idea why, but I just conjured up a three-word prompt: anvil, fluffy,                        sediment. Do with them as you will or not. (Yeah, I needa head to bed.)
I’ve said before that I am game for any challenge, so here goes:

Cold-Hearted
You’re fluffy as an anvil, as sweet as cod liver pie.
The sediment from the hearts you’ve broken piles up so high
that you can’t be seen behind it, so there you sit, alone.
reflecting on the shattered loves for which you must atone.

Image by Kasia Darenda on Unsplash. And this poem, although written in the second person, is not directed at the prompter. 

 

 

Delayed Warning

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Delayed Warning

A bout of indigestion can make a guy a grouch
and leave him prone to lying grumbling on the couch
while his wife stands listening, chuckling in the hall,
remembering how she had warned him not to eat it all.
Yet he had ingested it, as usual, in a hurry
before she could warn him that he was eating curry!

 

For the Three Things Challenge the words are: CHUCKLE GROUCH INDIGESTION
Image by towfiqu-barbhuiya- on Unsplash

Foggybaby Dreams

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Foggybaby Dreams Clarified
(For My Nephews––now Six Feet Tall.)

You flinched from my touch,
hated the red cowboy hats
I bought for you,
preferred the hundred
tiny grass frogs
to the cows we tried
to introduce
into your city lives,
had eyes only for the trucks
carrying salt for the cows
to gather after.

Early mornings,
you leaned against
my sleep.
And oh,
your sleep-wicked
hair
and your
sweet sour milkbreath
and the
slight fart smell
of your warm bunny p.j.’s,
your impeccable smiles.
Daylight
had barely
bedeviled
you yet.

Five minutes until
you melted
back into your
foggy baby dreams,
and I became
your
nostalgia.

For NaPoWriMo 2023, the first prompt is to write a poem inspired by a book cover.
Below is information for the book cover that seemed to best illustrate this poem:

And also for dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Split Seconds

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Split Seconds

On Valentine’s Day,
standing dizzy on a dry summer country road,
between weekend dances in different towns,
sweet 16 and finally kissed.

 My eccentric English professor,
slapping down his briefcase once, twice, three times
on his table at the front of the room,
opened the clasp, drew out our first papers,
and chose mine as the one to read aloud.

I felt the gun barrel pressed against my head,
heard the gun fire,
fell into the street and rose above
to see them lift his wounded body into a taxi,
my body lying in the street.

The woman in the dream
walked toward me across the barroom,
threw her drink in my face,
then hit me over the head with the glass
and I woke up soaking wet, with a knot on my head,
screaming, “Just wake up!”

I saw him for the first time
on the stage at the little coffee shop in Santa Monica
reading love poems he’d written to another woman,
and it was as though I’d been with him
for my whole life. Then afterwards,
I was with him for the rest of his.

He met me
at the plane
with a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup and a rose.
Hours later, in his kitchen,
after the long ride southward,
luggage spilled sideways on the floor—
another long-delayed
first kiss.

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to “write your own poem that provides five answers to the same question – without ever specifically identifying the question that is being answered.”

Cryogenic Ponderings

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Cryogenic Ponderings

I hear that they’re researching cryogenic preservation,
and I admit I view it with a certain hesitation.
I’m drawn to such longevity, but must admit I worry
about what aftereffects such a heedless act might curry.

As wily as I now may be, as cunning and as clever,
will irresistible qualities remain with me forever?
Will I be packed with garlic to keep me fresh and bugless?
Will I still be so sexy after eons going hugless?

Can minds be kept as fresh as flesh? Can kind hearts be conserved?
Can intellect and soul be saved and memory preserved?
What good will body do one in a thousand years or more
if they can not conserve those things we hold here in our core?

Prompt words today are drawn, irresistible, wily, garlic and cryogenic.
Image by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.

 

Story Time at the Library

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Story Time at the Library

Cluster here around me. Cross Your legs. Open your mind.
I’m going to tell you stories of a slightly silly kind.

Or lie back on the carpet, close your eyes and try to see
all the varied images that are going to be.

We’ll be crossing to another land where we can be whatever
each of us may want to be: beautiful, brave or clever.

Light the bulbs above your head. Imagine what you hear.
For the next half hour or so, you’l be “there” and not “here.”

In imagination’s magic land, all your dreams come true.
Climb aboard my story train and I’ll share it with you.

And now as then, the crowd being both clever and magnanimous,
They decided they’d all come along. The voting was unanimous.

And so the children climbed aboard to hear a tale or two—
precisely the same stories in the past that I told you.

 

Prompt words today are cluster,  crossing, bulb, unanimous and carpet,

More Fire on the Mountain

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Above are photos taken yesterday morning (May 3.) What looks like a bank of clouds is actually smoke from a fire that has been raging for five days on the slopes of Mount Garcia, the extinct volcano across the lake from me.


The grainy shot above (taken with my phone, so not the best photo) was taken at about 1 a.m. this morning, May 4th, from my rooftop terrace. If you want to get a better view of the fire, have a look at the time-lapse video for the past 24 hours on this site: http://www.ajijicweather.com/lakecam.

When Forgottenman suggested I write about the fire, I reminded him that I actually had written about fires on Mount Garcia many years ago, and he further suggested I reblog that blog, so, always willing to please, below is a link. The Maria Phoenix restaurant I mention, which became a favorite of mine after this first visit, has since been sold to new owners, but still, as regular as clockwork, Señor Garcia (as locals fondly call the mountain) continues to wear his yearly sombrero of smoke. Here is the link to my poem about the fires eight years ago:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2013/04/18/dining-alone-at-the-maria-bonita-restaurant-bar-day-18-of-napowrimo/

Evolution

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Evolution

Evolution’s done with behemoths. They take up too much space.
They were too slow and lumbering—lacking in poise and grace.
For this they paid the penalty of their eradication,
replaced by small creatures who consumed a smaller ration.

The intention was that humans would be weaker and less needy.
Who knew that they would turn into creatures so cruel and greedy?
Anything but genial, they grabbed what they could grab,
bringing devastation via bomb and gun and lab.

If larger didn’t work, it’s clear that smaller did no better.
Once again, nature’s creations have turned out her debtor.
She extracts her interest through flood and hurricane,
drought and deadly plagues and other methods more arcane.

Working up from smaller—from the atom and the quark,
nature reached its summit in Jurassic Park,
then created on a smaller scale ’til it arrived at man—
Homo sapiens her newest failed flash in the pan.

Now, where will she go from here? Tinier or bigger?
Will her next experiment be flyer, swimmer, digger?
Will she rue the excesses of the human brain
Or will she make the same mistake over once again?

Can she find a way at last to alter the machine,
by infusing it, at last, with the human gene?
Is a cyborg race of men the way that nature’s going?
Will mankind be coupled with things whirring, blinking, glowing?

Will we all be halfway clones of who we were before?
Will we think past generations to be the stuff of lore?
Have humans made themselves passé or will they rise once more—
a little less self-serving , less blemished at the core?

Prompt words today are behemoth, space, penalty, genial.

Overextended

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Overextended

I’m swamped with obligations, let alone what I like doing.
If it were Halloween, I would have no time for booing.
Gargoyles in the garden would have no satisfaction.
They could haunt me all they want, but they’d get no reaction.
I don’t have time for feeling, for music or for fun
until all of the tasks I face are finally through and done.
I can’t finagle time to merely mess around,
for I fear it is my habitude to be completely bound
by my check-lists and my calendar, and no, I don’t know why.
It’s simply in my nature to do and do or die!

 

A “friend” once told me with great irritatIon, “If you’re going to do all these things, Judy, just do them, but don’t for God’s sake talk about it!” I fear I’ve broken her injunction, finally, after all these years. This poem is tongue-in-cheek. All things I enjoy doing…but I do know how to make a mess.

Prompt words today are swamp, finagle, gargoyle, habitude, feel and music.