Daybreak
It’s a classic beginning for another day.
I push the covers out of the way,
fumble to find my glasses and shoes,
open the curtains to drown out the blues.
I am a champion at choosing a mood.
I refuse to be grumpy. Choose not to brood.
I put on my attitude before my clothes,
donning my blessings instead of my woes.
Today’s word prompt are the blues, classic, fumble and champion.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash, used with permission
Reconnaissance
Enter our shell-shocked hero, all his battles won.
His glorious sorties over, his service finally done.
The stash he found cathartic? He stole it from his son.
Exulting in this final raid, he thought he’d have some fun.
He only took a bit of it. Each day he took some more.
He chewed the bag a little bit, as though to make a door.
He saw his son’s perplexity, searching through the house.
Had a rat made off with it? Could it have been a mouse?
He found his son’s new hiding places—where he had been loitering,
making use of thirty years of army reconnoitering.
The freezer in the garage, a tea tin in the drain.
What enemy made raids into such difficult terrain?
His son could believe sorties over mountaintop and ridge,
but how might a mouse invade a freezer or a fridge?
This mystery went unsolved for at least a decade more,
at which point it was finally told and became family lore.
How his father returned home, fatigued by years of war
and found relief from raiding his teenager’s secret store.
And how these retirement maneuvers against his puzzled son
helped salve the scars of battle with a little fun.
Word prompts for today are fatigue, stash, cathartic, exult and hero.
Fault Line
When the call comes,
I feign ambivalence,
one more maneuver
to deny fault.
I did this
and you did that.
Who understands
the whole gestalt?
Back and forth we
thrust and parry
’til no one knows
who started what.
When did our love
became a battlefield?
That crest we aimed for
a well-worn rut?
Writing prompts today are: call, ambivalent, understated, maneuver and fault.
Unavoidable Photo Session
I refresh my makeup,
surrender to the camera,
and when I see the photographs,
force a quick acceptance.
I need to diet
and I am growing old.
Word prompts today are surrender, photograph, quick, refresh and acceptance.
Knave of Coins
Bored with all his yesterdays, needing a new tomorrow,
grown used to fickle intimacies, much to all our sorrow
he stood upon a precipice where the whole world looked back
and declared himself the ruler of the whole damn pack.
That anybody listened is a sort of modern miracle.
He wasn’t very smart and he surely was not lyrical.
Though he understood but little, what he knew just seemed to work.
One can capture much attention by being a dumb jerk.
He pulled the haters to him—the fearful and the jaded.
All his moneyed cronies supported him, elated.
He’d pull apart the world we knew and put it back again,
but I fear that what few plans he had turned out to be in vain.
For when he’d knocked everything down, he knew not what to do
except to blame the mess he’d made on everyone he knew.
The whole world knows that he’s a knave, his mind and soul both dim.
The thing that is distressing is those who supported him.
Word prompts today are overcome, fickle, intimacy, precipice and yesterday.
The Groom Dances with Grandma
She struggles to keep time as they circle ’round the floor,
her flushed face with its rosy hues signaling “no more!”
This dancing she once lived for has come to be a task,
whereas the problem once was whether any boy would ask.
Standing in the wallflower line, wishing for a fella,
whereas sixty years later, a chair and an umbrella
would serve to meet her wishes, for this dancing in the sun
at her grandson’s wedding has turned out to be no fun.
What she needs in her dotage is not cognate with the dreams
of those age fifteen fantasies that burst her at the seams,
spilling out her future hopes, sure they’d be the same—
that there would be no change of rules in this living game.
Memories of graceful maneuvers through the night
remembered at one’s leisure are a pure delight.
Yet all those youthful dreams of blithely swirling ’round the floor
have matured into her fantasies of sneaking out the door.
Word prompts for today are rosy hues, circle, dancing, cognate and umbrella. Image by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash, used with permission.
Click on photos to enlarge and view captions. A poem follows.
Meditations from My Room
I share different company in my isolation.
Dogs litter my studio floor,
and my backyard is
an in-between place for birds
passing as though at a freeway interchange,
this way and that.
A constant flutter of butterflies
stirs air around the orange and yellow thunbergia,
lush in this season that mixes sun and rain.
They soar down to the empty lot
and back again,
as though no creature can resist
collecting here in my domain.
Nature follows no rules of man.
It cannot learn obeisance or heed human leverage.
Our world, professional and polished—
how easily by nature now turned inward upon itself.
Our burnished world can hold no sway,
for nature heeds no golden cow.
Her empathy extended toward the broader view,
nature must change the things she can.
She has been patient with us long enough. The time is now.
Prompt words today are empathy, leverage, patient, burnish and professional.
Grandpa’s Pronouncement at the Family Reunion
“Pack up all your suitcases, we’re going on vacation.
Don’t forget your sleeping bags and some alimentation.
We’re heading out in two hours for the challenge of your lives,
so load up all your kids and hurry up your wives.
I’m making a pronouncement that perhaps you won’t agree with,
but since you are the folks that I most enjoy to be with,
I spent all of your legacies on this giant bus
that it is my fondest wish to fill with only us
and set out for the summer having various adventures.
Most likely we’ll get lost and perhaps Gram will lose her dentures,
but all-in-all we’ll have great times that no one will forget.
You’re going to spend this summer with the finer set.
I’ve cleared it with your bosses. I’ve contacted your friends.
No need to call anyone. No need to make amends.
You’ll live without your boyfriends for a month or two.
Just tell them that your family needs some time with you.
Go and find your places–kids all in the back.
I have some games to play with you while your mothers pack.
No phones, laptops or notebooks are allowed aboard the bus.
I want communication to be narrowed down to us.
I’ll teach you snakes and ladders, Monopoly and Chess.
You can beat your Uncle Tom and your Auntie Bess,
your grandma and your sisters, your cousins and your brother.
Why bother to beat someone else when you can beat each other?”
The ending you might well project. The mom’s find fault. The kids object.
But once he’d packed us all inside and started out on our grand ride,
we settled down and all joined in to get to know their closest kin
and all in all, that summer trip, each tent-pitching, each skinny dip
turned into one fine memory, just as Gramp knew it would be!
(Click on photos to enlarge and view as slide show.)
Prompt words today are pronounced, legacy, challenge, alimentation and suitcase. Sadly, this is fiction and the photos a compilation of various friends and family. I wish this had happened, but alas, it didn’t. The fourth photo is a picture of part of my actual family.
The Supervisor
He’s enamored of particulars, pedantic to the end.
Impressed by rank and privilege and rules ones can’t bend.
Though not swimming in his compliments, He’s lavish in critique—
always another detail he can find for you to tweak.
If you’re in constant contact, you have my sympathy
as well as sincere thankfulness that it’s not empathy!!!
Prompt words today are pedantic, rank, contact, lavish and swimming.
Photo by Alessandro Bellone on Unsplash, used with permission
Old Friends
We are grappling with our friendship over difference of opinions.
My beliefs are liberal. He’s one of Donald’s minions.
He won’t put up with teasing. I can’t bear his iron will.
Of faux patriotic slogans, I fear I’ve had my fill.
How can it be that all those years I thought that he had heart,
he was harboring this meanness? When did it get its start?
This virus in our populace that masks as patriotism
spreads misinformation, creating such a schism
that no bridge can be long enough to bring us all together.
The strength of our convictions seems to hold us at short tether.
When will come the end of it, and if that end should come,
what will end this great discordance and restore the hum
of democratic harmony? Are voices so distorted
that we cannot reclaim the friends with whom we once consorted?
When I walk the streets where we once walked, my former friend and I,
he crosses to the other side if he sees me walk by.
When change comes, certain evils must come to an end,
but I don’t think it will mend the hearts of me and my old friend.
Word prompts for today are tease, iron, opinion, grapple and friendship.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 