Tag Archives: Rag Tag Daily Prompt

Proddings

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Proddings

I guess that it took gumption to stray so far from home.
Who knows why certain people are driven so to roam?
For certain, curiosity plays a part in it—
a proclivity to action, a resistance to just sit.
A passion to be accurate in finding all their pieces.
A need for further education after school ceases.
But I can’t help but feel that there is more to it than this.
It isn’t only fearing those things that we might miss.
There’s always that small feeling that we do not belong––
that sense of isolation from the local throng.
It is a bit like pushing the odd fledgling from the nest
who does not belong. The other fledglings may know best
who would belong best elsewhere, and speed them on their way.
Odd ducks who display gumption or creative ones must pay.
And in becoming targets, they are prodded to depart
to find other places where they can make their start
to finding who they are in life—places where they can see
all those different people that they might be meant to be.

East Timor, 1973. Off on a long adventure

These word prompts were made use of in the above poem:

RagTag: https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/rdp-16-target/Target
Daily Addictions:https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/: Accurate
FOWC: https://fivedotoh.com/: Gumption
Weekly Prompts: https://weeklyprompts.com/: Home

Falling Water

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This is one of three waterfalls that spill down the mountain behind my house during the rainy season.

Falling Water

You, my wild and rushing daughter
remind me of falling water
spilling  from one place to another
while your sister and your brother
are calm ponds—docile and still.
Do you think you ever will
come to rest within our glade
or will you continue to cascade
from mountainside to jungle floor,
always rushing out the door
to adventures in a farflung world?
Another part of you unfurled
in some new place and some new time,
a foreign place you find sublime.
We’ve had one life. You’ve had a few.
Why, love, will one world not do?

 

For the Rag Tag Daily Prompt, the word of the day was cataract.

Although I don’t have a brother and my family did move around a bit (but not as much as I have,) this poem was based a bit on the only letter my father ever wrote to me. I had been traveling and working abroad for a few years by then, first in Australia, then in Singapore and Africa. I’ve remembered one of sections: “The wild geese have rested on the pond for the night. They remind me of you, my wild fledgling, winging your way across the world with no place to call your own.” Those words, so poetic, show a side of my father I wish he had brought out more frequently on paper, so here I’ve done it for him.