Tag Archives: Ragtag Daily Post

“Flight” for Ragtag Daily Prompt

If We Listened to the Birds

If We Listened to the Birds

If I were a mighty bird,
fluent in both voice and word,
when the weather shifted colder,
I’d wing myself to royal shoulder,
have a perch and, I confess,
use all the powers I possess
to loosen up and leave my mark
on that stodgy matriarch,
to feel my presence and touch of wings
and know what necessary things
each creature in nature brings with it.
How each thing comes together to fit.

This I would find exhilarating.
By my presence, educating
the powers-that-be to think of nature
as more than just a nomenclature.
Perhaps I’d tell the president
that I have been heaven sent
to tell the powers that abide
that God’s not really on their side.
God would have us guard our earth
There’s more than money that marks its worth.
All of nature, without a doubt,
makes the world of man work out.

If those large personalities
who run our world would only, please,
take heed of what I have to say,
we’d survive to live another day,
another year, another eon.
We’d have a peaceful planet to be on.
The brother eagle that guides their flight
knows too well extinction’s plight.
The symbol there that marks their seal
is anguished over the ordeal
that fellow creatures of nature face
because of loss of living space.

Our national parks sold off for oil,
waters from which fish recoil,
oceans plugged with plastic waste
we idly cast off in our haste.
While politicians rail and bicker,
our society grows sicker.
Hospitals far out of reach,
schools encouraged not to teach
science, but religious fable
that makes the politicians able
to pull the wool over the eyes
of those who believe their disguise.

It’s true that often what we get
is exactly opposite
of what they promise, their rhetoric
stirring us to moods euphoric
when in fact they’re empty words
meant to bilk admiring herds.
Look deeper at what they profess.
They promise more, but give us less.

The RDP Prompt is “Flight.”

Separate Vacations

 

Separate Vacations

I guess it was inevitable that there’d be a breach 
with you wanting the mountains and me wanting the beach.
We’re broken into moieties, with one kid choosing you
the other choosing me so you know what we’ve gotta do.
You’re fierce in your decision and my determination
to have my way as well in terms of this winter vacation
means we’ll relax in different climes—you snow and me the sun.
Then we’ll get back together once our holidays are done.
Marriages find ways to work in snow and sunny weather,
but sometimes it works for the best when they’re not faced together.

 

Prompt words today are beach, inevitable, fierce, moiety and holiday.

Backdoor Sliders

 

Backdoor Sliders

I take a break from my last chore
to peer through glass, ceiling to floor.
For though a view I never lack,
my house’s eyes are all in back.
I watch the gardener cut and trim,
the locksmith to the right of him.

One scrubs the algae from the pool—
a craftsman polishing his jewel.
A man on ladder repairs the wall,
the tree-trimmer the highest of all.
See how we tend her outer skin–
they without and we within?

Yolanda sweeps the terrace floor,
then comes inside to sweep some more.
Inside I watch and labor, too,
for there are many tasks to do.
I dust and gather detritus,
smooth out wrinkles, straighten muss.

Three days a week we labor so
until I wonder if I know
which is the owner and which the thing
that luxury and comfort brings?
Dear house, is it you that harbors me,
or am I here to maintain thee?

 

DSC09933 DSC09379 DSC09411 DSC09498 DSC09902 IMG_1520 IMG_1512 DSC09935


The Boss:
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DSCF3572

 

 

RDP’s prompt for today is looking out of my backdoor. Since I did this prompt three years ago, I decided to reprint that post today. I had forgotten it. Hopefully, if you’ve been following me for that long, you have, too.

The Monarch of Plastic: Jan 5, 2019

 The Monarch of Plastic

We’re up against the wall, now—climbing, scratching, pawing,
as behind us in the ice, monsters are quickly thawing.
We have great gratitude for life and all the joys it brings,
but now we have to pay the price for all our pretty things.
Those lovely cars that speed us on toward our various pleasures
now ask their price in taking from us other dearer treasures.—
Breath and water we might drink and swim in with no thought—
those departing natural things our pretty toys have bought.
Plastic for our jar tops, plastic for our carrying,
pretty soon this plastic will be handy for our burying.
In the hilltops safe above our ocean’s spreading grasp,
the king of plastic sits surveying his world’s parting gasp.
Still he does not worry, for he feels safe on his throne.
unaware that one day he’ll enjoy this world alone.

 The prompts today are wall, gratitude and thawing

https://fivedotoh.com/2019/01/05/fowc-with-fandango-wall/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/gratitude/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/01/05/thawing/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/01/02/your-daily-word-prompt-natural-January-2-2019/

Random Travel

Random Travel

There’s precious little rectitude in knowing where you’re going.
Straight lines are only called for when you’re writing or you’re sewing.
I think there’s room in travel for a little ingenuity
so long as you don’t coddiwomple on in perpetuity.

The words today are ingenuity, rectitude, precious and coddiwomple. Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/27/monday-prompt-coddiwomple/
(To coddiwomple is “to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination.)
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/27/fowc-with-fandango-ingenuity/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/27/rectitude/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/daily-addictions-2018-week-34/precious

Intergalactic Anthropology

 

jdbphoto, badlands, South Dakota

Intergalactic Anthropology

Our world may be the nucleus of a constellation
viewed elsewhere in the universe, and to their consternation,
they may not be able to determine if we’re able
to support a life form both intelligent and stable.

They’ve watched as we developed fire and the wheel,
the industrial revolution , the ability to heal.
They’ve watched the growth of tyrants and they’ve watched our revolutions—
all our massive problems and our tries for the solutions.

But as the rich get richer, they’re more heedless of the poor.
The more that they accumulate, the more they lust for more.
Heedless of our artful world with beauties unsurpassed,
the practices that they pursue assure that they won’t last.

Should they contact and help us or leave us as we are—
an anthropological study of another distant star?

The prompt words were: contact, nucleus, constellation, practice

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/rdp-70-contact/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/09/fowc-with-fandango-nucleus/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/constellation/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/practice

When My Sister Plays the Piano

 

jdb photo

This is  a poem written when I visited my sister in the first stages of memory loss. it is a bittersweet memory that I shared with only a few of you five years ago when I first started my blog but which very few people read, judging from the number of views and “likes.” This memory, as most are, is bittersweet.

When My Sister Plays the Piano

The first notes, beautiful and true, float like a memory up the stairs.
In the week I’ve been here in her house with her, she has not played the piano
and so I thought her music was gone like her memory of what day it is
or whether I am her sister, her daughter or an unknown visitor.

Yet on this morning after her 76th birthday celebration,
music slips like magic from the keys: song after song
from “Fur Elise” to a sweet ballad I don’t know the name of—
sure and correct at first,
then with a heartfelt emotion we had both forgotten.

“Midnight Concerto,”
“Sunrise, Sunset”—
song after song
expressed
in an unfaltering language—
some synchronicity of mind and hand
her brain has opened the door to.

While I listen, time stands still for me
as it has for her so often in the past few years
as yesterday and today shuffle together to
crowd out all consideration of future fears.

For ten minutes or more, she segues
from melody to melody
with no wrong note.
Then “Deep Velvet,”
a song she has played from memory
so many times,
dies after twenty-four notes.
Like a gift held out and snatched away,
I yearn for it, pray she’ll remember.

After an uncharted caesura, her music streams out again,
sweet and sure, for a staff or two—
the sheet music giving her a guide her brain so often can’t.
But after a longer pause, I know it is lost
like the thread of so many conversations.
A hiccup of memory, folding itself away.

“Come And Worship” chimes out
like the tolling of a bell.
The wisp of the old hymn, two phrases only—
before it, too, fades.

That sudden muffled sound.
Is it a songbook displaced from its stand as she searches for another;
or the lid of the piano, quietly closing on yet another partial memory?

 

The Ragtag prompt today was memories.