Excuse # 2
Quick, take my hand before I float off
on a breeze or a sigh or a sneeze or a cough.
No telling what currents are swelling today
to pick a girl up and float her away.
Oh, excuse number one?
Hand holding is fun!
For DVerse Poets: https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/10/quadrille-64-quickwrite-something/
Earthlings
Children love to play in it,
while miners spend their day in it.
We grow our food and build each home
in our planet’s dark rich loam.
If we are wise, we choose to mentor it,
lest too soon we’re called to enter it.
The prompt word for the dVerse Poets Quadrille challenge was “earth.” The only rule for a quadrille is that it must be exactly 44 words long, not counting the title.
To Get a Poem
(5 Quadrilles)
Leave the dirty dishes in the sink.
A dishwasher washes the poems away.
Allow cat hair to accumulate on the footstool.
Cat hair is a city for poems.
Let plants go another day before watering,
lest poems in the soil should be flushed away.
Let lie the crumpled sock a friend’s child
left in the sleeping loft.
Don’t destroy the poem of it.
Don’t bother to rake leaves.
Poems cannot live in neat piles.
Leave the soupstain on your shirt .
Tomato and basil are ingredients of poetry.
There is a poem in the confetti of paper on the bedroom carpet
and in the bread crumbs and the orphaned straight pins.
Bills in the “TO BE PAID” folder?
Each is the embryo of a poem.
Paying them now would be poetry murder.
In my living room, there is more poetry
in the blankets of dust on glass tables
than the burnished surface of the clay vase.
There is more poetry, more poetry, more poetry
than can ever be tidied up in this world or the next.
Falling poetry snarls in the weave of the hammock.
All of this raw poetry lies around us, primed for the collecting.
Messy poetry and dusty.
You won’t die from, but you could live on
poetry that’s hidden in the messy corners of your world.
For dVerse Poets. The prompt was to write a quadrille on the subject of poetry.
Bentley, Bearcat and Patti. bouncers extraordinnaire
A Veterinarian’s Decree
Gram for gram, ounce for ounce,
a kitten has the greatest bounce.
Every ruffle, every flounce
is an excuse to leap and pounce.
That’s why I’m driven to denounce
their misbehavior and announce,
no longer will I handle kittens
unless garbed in protective mittens!
For dVerse Poets, the quadrille prompt word is “bounce.”
Please click on any photo to enlarge all.
Quartet
They flicker like tiny sparks,
these rapid kittens
intense in attention,
movements reflecting
every neighboring small movement.
Suspicious of brief distractions.
Violent, then soft like the feather
they’ve destroyed,
drifting to the window frame above,
forgotten by its intense stalkers
of a second before.
Silent Spring
The best thing to remember to relieve a snowstorm’s sting
is that when there is no winter, there can’t be any spring.
And yet I must admit to you, I have not any qualms
about spending all my winters at the ocean, beneath palms!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 