Tag Archives: #RDP

A Vindication of Single Life

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A Vindication of Single Life

I will not love for comfort. I will not love for gold.
I will not love for custom nor approval of the fold.
The handsomest of profiles will not win my hand.
Fair face alone will not insure I’ll wear a wedding band.

Those whom others seek to wed are not my man of choice.
I want a man gentle of heart but bold of word and voice.
One with an eye for beauty written in other places
aside from what the world demands in figure and in faces.

That certain novel contour molded by his hand.
A forearm strongly muscled. Sinewy and tanned.
Serious in nature, but not too melancholy.
Capable of fine reasoning, but also fun and jolly.

A man who carries others securely in his heart.
A man I am a part of even when we are apart.
An oddball twist of humor. A unique bend of mind.
Someone glib in rejoinder, but also fair and kind.

I am by no means perfect in demeanor nor in form.
My face is not the fairest and my habits aren’t the norm.
I am not the world’s best dancer nor a very sexy dame,
but  I bet someone exists whose imperfections are the same!


Written for these two prompts.  Check out their URLS and come play along:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/rdp-50-gold/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/07/20/fowc-with-fandango-melancholy/

In the Open

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In the Open

The day is balmy
with segmented clouds.
The African tulip tree
spreads its boughs wide
over the seated ones
as well as the one who stands in front of us,
leading us to ground our feet,
relax our arms with hands palms up
and to go inside ourselves
to watch our breath
and be in the now,
in the state that she calls openness.

To be in the future is not openness, she says,
and to be in the past is not openness.
Only the now is really living.
And it occurs to me
that when I think I want a cup of coffee
and leave my studio to go in search of it,
then, in the kitchen,
can’t remember what I’m there for,
(and the reason why so many
friends my age are doing the same)
is because we are in this state of openness
more frequently
as we get older.
Wanting a cup of coffee is in the future,
and remembering we wanted a cup of coffee
a few minutes ago
is having to remember the past.

Standing here in the kitchen
listening to the baby birds’
loud cheeps
from their nest in the kitchen overhang
is being in the now.
And so it is that all of us, as we age,
are in the deepest stages of meditation
most of the time
and should not worry so much
about Alzheimer’s or dementia,
because we are where Tibetan monks
and ladies leading meditiation
would have us be.

Open. Living the now
with increasingly
less memory
for what was
or was to be.

 

The Ragtag prompt today is open.

Pied Beauty II

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Today’s prompt being “spoof,” I decided to resurrect this parody of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty,” one of my first blogs ever back in 2014:

Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

 

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The Ragtag prompt is spoof.

Blind Potential

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Blind Potential

This trail of salt reveals to me you’re led by superstition.
Eyes shut tight, you stumble on, following tradition.
Like a deer in headlights, you are blinded by the light
that others cast, refusing to be guided by insight.

There is a light inside you that will lead you much more surely.
That little nudge that prompts you will guide you more securely.
Trust that spark within you to tell you what to do.
You need not fear those  instincts you carry within you.

They are the wisdom of the universe, trying to get out.
If you do not heed their whisper, you may later hear their shout.
What you deem as accidents might be communication
from that inner part of you, prompting your education.

Although those outer voices may continue to deride,
trust your inner voices. They are firmly on your side.
What you find within you may be genius that’s unknown
that won’t come to fruition until it has been sown.

You are its only guardian. Only you can plant and tend
and bring these new world miracles to their fruitful end.
Do not let superstition or fear of the what could be
keep you from that within you that is your destiny.

 

The Ragtag prompt is superstition.
Fandango’s promt is fear.

Sweet Tooth

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Sweet Tooth

There are certain practices I’m anxious to curtail,
but I find my past attempts were to no avail.
Cookies placed before me vanish without a trace,
and if you’re toting donuts, you’d better bring your mace.
I  should eschew both cake and pie, for I cannot afford it.
So just in case you plan to share, please change your mind and hoard it!!

 

 

The Ragtag prompt today is trace.
Fandango’s prompt FOWC is curtail.
And Daily Addiction’s is afford.

Spinning Top

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Spinning Top

Is senility a resurrected prenatal state—
hearing the outer world
with limited stages of connection?
Or is it a journey backwards through a lifetime,
remembering details pushed into
the closets of the mind by daily tasks?

The hum of a life is deafening in this world.
Even with earbuds or headsets,
the noise of the world streams in,
wired direct into our consciousness,
quelling thoughts of our own,
wiping clean for the time being,
memories.

The whole world with us every minute
leads to no world of our own.
Barraged our entire lives,
more now than ever,
does senility offer a time before our death
to connect with our inner selves once more?

Relieved of the world,
do we spin like a top into that inner world,
remembering a lifetime lost to activity—
the resurrected adolescence of old age 
evolving backwards into a dreaming time
wherein we joyfully wander ourselves again?

Some choose the rope, fearing a nightmare of senility,
yet some of us hope for a return to dreams of childhood,
relieved of all care, even for ourselves.
No one comes back to tell us which it is,
yet some of us?
 We hope.
We hope.

 

For RDP the prompt was Resurrection.

Black Hole

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R=(2GM)/(c^2)

As we’ve evolved from scales to skin,
growing the body we’re now in,
Did our mind grow here inside?
How did our soul come to abide
secure within this human form?
How did it come to be the norm?
Did words form here in you and me
simply because they yearned to be?
Were they put here to link us to
that in the eternal stew
that unites us all, in our unknowing
to a universal glowing?
And if so, what an irony
as words transform and set us free,
they also split us wide apart––
placing the head before the heart.
Substituting a dollar sign
for solutions that should be divine.
Can this be our ultimate goal,
in our journey toward our own black hole?
To grow our mind and freeze our heart
until it blows us all apart?
As science seeks to understand,
it holds us all within its hand.
It has the means, if it should please,
to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
I wonder, then, can even a soul
escape the pull of a black hole?

The RDP prompt today is scale.
The Daily Addictions prompt was transform.

Word Pie

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DSC09231

Word Pie

I take them as a milestone, these long afternoon naps
that make my late nights possible by filling in the gaps
between compulsive writing sessions to meet the assignment
of all these daily prompt words coming to us by consignment!

Blogging’s become a nightmare that’s turned me slightly manic.
Prompts have me fully frustrated and in a mid-life panic.
(To be truthful, only “midlife” if one forty is my lifespan,
which, if I had my druthers, really would become my lifeplan!)

Prompts now come like a waterfall that’s turned on every morning.
I might have just ignored them if I’d only had a warning
that I’d become obsessive in using one and all.
(I have them in my bookmarks and must daily heed their call.)

That WordPress prompt now seems like poverty. One short month ago
we only had one daily prompt site where all of us would go.
Every day, we waited for it like the early morning sun,
but now we face a heat wave for there isn’t only one.

Ragtag and Fandango have become Daily Addictions—
not to mention other Word Prompts that demand our daily fictions.
Cee’s Share Your World still tempts us, as does that dVerse Poet.
We could have stuck to only them. Alas, we did not know it!

Now we are all scrambling to fill  all their demands.
It keeps our poor brains busy, not to mention how our hands
cramp up from all this typing as our lives all go awry
as we all line up to get each daily slice of prompt site pie!

This poem is an attempt to meet all of the below prompts..Ooops, sorry “Heatwave,” I slipped a photo prompt in without realizing it.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/rdp-29-milestone/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/poverty/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/06/29/fowc-with-fandango-nightmare/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/27/word-prompt-frustrating/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/23/photo-challenge-heat-wave

https://ceenphotography.com/2018/06/25/share-your-world-june-25-2018/

 

https://weeklyprompts.com/prompts/

https://weeklyprompts.com/2018/06/27/word-prompt-frustrating/

Self-indulgence

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Some would say I was indulging my pets when I built them their own little room onto my house, then steps down into the pool to aid in Morrie’s easy exit when he goes in to retrieve a ball I haven’t retrieved and thrown for him with sufficient speed, but in truth, I’m indulging myself as it means more space in my part of the house, less worry that Morrie will drown if he falls in the pool when it is half full, and more ease in feeding them since there is a little fridge and pull-out drawers for their dry food in their room so I don’t have to stoop over to scoop. Nor do I have to let them in and out on rainy nights, because it has its own entrance. No cruises or diamonds for me.  Just give me a new doggie domain and steps down into the pool.  Indulging us all.

The Ragtag prompt today is indulgence.

lifelessons's avatarlifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Now that we are recovered from and over the thrill of the Doggie Domainconstruction earlier this year, I have decided the pups needed a second indulgence.  For 15 years, I’ve been entering and leaving my pool via a ladder really intended for a hot tub, which makes the first step a doozie and upper arm strength a must. Until Morrie arrived, I’ve never thought much about what would happen if one of the dogs fell in the pool.  Although they all hate the water, probably because it is their super-sized doggy water dish and they even resent me immersing myself in it, I nonetheless have pulled them all into the pool enough times to know that when it is full, they can make it to the side and crawl out.  The problem is that sometimes it is half full, because Pasiano empties it half way three mornings a week to allow…

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Late Check-Out

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Late Check-out

The camera battery left in its charger in a motel in St. Louis,
my batik sarong left gracing a hostel bed in Jakarta,
my only pair of shoes in Timor.
A pair of Levis in Singapore,
my diary in Tanjung Pinang,
my swimsuit in Sri Lanka.

I am lost all over the world,
and this is why, five minutes after
my sister has gone down to check out of the St. Paul hotel,
I am rechecking the beds and desk tops of our room.

My bag packed and zipped at the door,
my purse and computer case propped next to it,
I sift through soggy towels in the tub,
open the closet door once more
to rattle empty hangers,
check each plug socket on each wall.

 

“Check” is the Ragtag Daily Prompt today. This is a rewrite of a poem written three years ago.