Tag Archives: poems abut memory

Selective Memorabilia

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Selective Memorabilia

Leftover bits of brilliant past acts
help enliven today’s less illustrious facts.
In avoiding the present, we can overlook
the unplanned digressions that our lives took.
Memory’s like an expandable shelf
where we can stack up our reminders of self.
We can keep all the good stuff and throw out the bad—
all of the upsets and down times we’ve had.
We can tack up our ribbons, trash each demerit
and just hoard a memory if we can bear it!

Prompt words for today are leftover, avoid, brilliant and enliven. The photo is a detail from one of my mixed media collages.

TAKING THE LONG WAY HOME

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Taking the Long Way Home
IMG_0331
Class Reunion

Since we know where we are going so well,
let’s take the longest route there,
out past England’s Hill and that dip in the road we kids called lover’s leap.
Silly the traditions we tried to pretend––as though our histories weren’t long enough
to have attracted real ones. Now all of those old newnesses
are curling with age, discolored, cracking at the edges––
their roughness catching realities and dreams
and mixing them together so none of us
can remember the difference.

The Prompt: This Is Your Song–Take a line from a song that you love or connect with. Turn that line into the title of your post. (My song was “Long Way Home” by Tom Waits.)