Tag Archives: RDP

Plaza Scene in the Time of the Coronavirus

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Plaza Scene in the Time of the Coronavirus

Birds pick at rice
gone stale on the steps of the church.
Doors closed,
no choir sings matins
on this Sunday morn.

Rolling over in their beds
or gathered around the breakfast table,
the faithful listen to the mass
broadcast over speakers
loud enough to be heard a mile away,

while belligerent teens, sabotaging
their parents’ careful advice,
make the green benches
in the plaza across the street
their communal habitat.

 

Prompt words for today are belligerent, care, sabotage, rice and habitat.

Oh, if Only

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Oh, if Only

Folks from the east and folks from the west
are going to parley to see what is best.
They’ll quiz the offenders and empty them out
to see what this deception has all been about.
If they empty their dark souls and spill their confessions,
at the end of all of these fact-finding sessions,
we can correct their corruption and sin
and really make America greater again!

Prompt words today are empty, confession, quiz, parley and west.

Bird Chorus

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and came closer to the bait

Bird Chorus

Birds perch on countless branches, each a separate bell
ringing out the cadence of stories they must tell.
Around them, eerie silence, for no other sounds compete.
No calls of children playing. No pattering of feet

up and down the pavement. No playing girls and boys,
for all the busy humans, infamous for their noise,
are staying in their houses and no amount of blustering
from their scattered leaders is bound to stop their clustering.

Families draw in closer as friends all fade away
into their particular intentions for the day.
Offices turn cyber. Schools are merely screens.
Mothers sit at kitchen tables, perusing magazines.

Fathers pace on carpets and worry about money.
How are they to make it now that the world’s gone funny?
Now and then, the silence split open by a bell
tolling for the human race who haven’t done too well

at going with the scheme of things. They prefer to take over,
making malls and parking lots out of fields of clover.
Trashing up the landscape. Peppering the tide
with their plastic mountains grown too big to hide.

Is it any wonder how nature responds?
We’ve held her prisoner long enough. She’s sloughing off her bonds.
She’s given us broad hints, but still we do not mind her.
So she’s erasing her mistakes and putting us behind her.

 

Prompt words today are countless branches, amount, eerie, infamous and bell.

Good Riddance?

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Good Riddance

They’re trying to railroad us, set us adrift
so we’ll never close this incredible rift.
They’ll write our obituaries, every one
It started the day that reason was done .
We surrendered control to the men who let cash
prompt their decisions most foolish and rash.

The delicate balance of nature upended,
they pillaged the earth until it grew offended
and began to fight back through hurricanes, fire,
droughts, floods, marine deaths and then acts more dire.
When all these disasters failed to inspire us,
her weapon became the coronavirus.

Now they flounder on, our greedy politicians,
less leaders than they are our nation’s morticians.
They stew about markets, fuss over the Dow.
As ever, cash profits are their sacred cow.
While those who must vote to try to defeat them
are all prisoners of home with no way to unseat them.

Can you not see the end with wildlife in the streets,
stampeding down pavement, their hollow hoof beats
like drums that announce humanity’s end?
What messages might they possibly send?
The earth isn’t dependent on mankind to thrive.
When we are long gone, nature will survive.  

Words for the day are delicate, dependent, obituary, adrift and railroad. https://reflectionsofanuntidymind.blog/

Animals Invade Cities As People Quarantine Themselves At Home.
Read the Story Here:  https://www.boredpanda.com/animals-in-streets-during-coronavirus-quarantine/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

 

Piscine Phobia

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Piscine Phobia

I don’t eat salmon, don’t eat flounder.
I prefer my protein rounder—
chicken, roasts or food like that.
Fish is too fishy and too flat.

Tuna mixed with soup and noodle,
I despise kit and caboodle!
Nothing could persuade me that
I should eat food fit for a cat.

I won’t eat food grown in a swamp,
so crabs and clams I never chomp.
No protein caught by motor boat
will ever pass my teeth and throat.

When dinner parties serve up chowder,
I’m likely to just take a powder.
I simply can’t take the suspense
of what fish lurks in soup so dense.

So if you want to plan a treat
that I will find the nerve to eat,
once again, I must repeat,
forget the lobster. Give me meat!!

Words for today are flounder, suspense, nothing, swamped and motor.

Bearings

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Bearings

“I’ve lost my bearings,” she said to me, perplexed. She was sitting alone in her room, surrounded by piles of clothing on the bed and floor around her—the collapsed small tents of abandoned full skirts, the shards of scarves and small mismatched clutterings of shoes.

She had been abandoned in a daydream world that only she lived in, but that she seemed as confused by as she was by those of us who tried to visit her there. For her, even changing clothes had become an insurmountable obstacle—a challenge that rivaled childbirth, an unfaithful husband, an addicted son, an autistic grandson. It rivaled the war she’d staged against her much-younger sister—the power she held over that sister by her rejection of her. It rivaled her efforts to enter the world again as a single woman and to try to win the world over to the fact that it was all his fault. It rivaled her insistence that it was the world that was confused in refusing to go along with all her beliefs and justifications.

She had barely if ever left a word unspoken when it came to an argument. It was so simple, really. She was always right. That everyone in the world, and more particularly her younger sister, refused to believe this was a thorn in her side. The skin on her cheek itched with the irritation over the unfairness of the world. She had worn a path in it, carving out a small trench so that the skin even now was scaly with that road traversed over and over again by one chewed-off fingernail. “Are you she?” She asked me, and when I admitted I was, she added, “Oh, you were always so irritating. Even as a little girl. Why could you never be what anyone else wanted you to be? You were always so, so—yourself!”

It was my chance, finally, for an honest conversation with this sister 11 years older—more a crabby mother always, than a sister. A chance if she could keep on track long enough to remember both who I am and who we both once were.

“So what was wrong with how I was, Betty? With how I am?”

“Oh, you were always so . . . . “ She stopped here, as though struggling for a word or for a memory. I saw her eyes stray to the floor between the door and the dresser. “There’s that little fuzzy thing there,” she said. I could see her eyes chart the progress of this creature invisible to me across the room.

I hung on to the thought she had so recently abandoned. “But me, Betty. What do you find wrong with me?”

Her eyes came back to me and connected, suddenly, with a sort of snap that made me think we were back in the same world again as she contemplated by last question. I tried to keep judgment out of my own gaze—to keep her here with me for long enough to connect on at least this one question.

“You were,” she said, and it was with that dismissive disgusted tone she had so often used with me since I was a very small child. “You were just so mystical!”

I was confused, not sure that the word she had used was the one she meant to use.

“What do you mean by mystical, Betty?” I sat on the bed beside her and reached out for the static wisps of hair that formed a cowlick at the back of her head—evidence of the long naps which had once again taken over her life, after a long interim period of raising kids, running charities and church prayer circles, and patrolling second-hand-stores, traveling to PEO conventions and staying on the good side of a number of eccentric grandchildren.

“Oh, you know. All those mystical experiences! The E.S.P. and all those other stories you told my kids. And Mother. Even Mother believed you.”

Then a haze like a layer of smoke once more seemed to pass over her eyes, dulling her connection to this time and reality and to me.

Her chin trembled and a tear ran down her cheek. She ran one fingernail-chewed index finger over and over the dome of her thumb and her face broke into the crumpled ruin of a child’s face who has just had its heart broken, the entire world of sadness expressed in this one face. I put my arms around her, and for the first time in our lives, she did not pull away. We rocked in comfort to each other, both of us mourning something different, I think. Me mourning a sister who now would never be mine in the way that sisters are meant to be. Her mourning a self that she had not been able to find for a very long time.

“Oh, the names I have been called in my life,” I was thinking.

“Oh, the moon shadows on the table in the corner. What do they mean?” She was thinking.

The last time I gave my sister a fortune cookie, she went to the bathroom and washed it off under the faucet, chuckling as though it was the most clever thing in the world to do. She then hung it on a spare nail on the wall.

When I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom, she nodded yes, and moved in the direction of the kitchen. Then she looked at the news scroll on the television and asked if those were directions for her. If there was something she was supposed to be doing. And that picture on the wall. What was it telling her she was supposed to do?

In the end, I rubbed her head until she fell asleep, covered her and stole away. I’d fly away the next morning, leaving her to her new world as she had left me to mine from the very beginning.

Prompt words today are hang on, contemplate, daydream, bearing and surround.

The Big Lesson

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fusion-medical-animation-EAgGqOiDDMg-unsplash Image by fusion medical animation. Amazing that something so beautiful
could cause such devastation.  As beautiful mankind has, as well.

The Big Lesson

Though isolation is the pits, illness is much worse,
so I must think of things to do while dealing with this curse.
I’m drinking lots of water, blowing hot air up my nose,
disinfecting doorknobs, washing all my clothes.
I have to pass on going out on dinner dates with friends
and make do with freezer food until this virus ends.

I clean out all my cupboards, dig into dusty files
and sort my poems from years ago neatly into piles.
I cancelled out on reading poems at our bi-monthly gathering.
Instead, I overhaul old poems and set about the lathering
of all suspected surfaces: computer, hands and phone.
(The cats both head out for the door, thinking “Leave us alone!”)

I spend all the time with me I used to spend with friends.
When I run out of toilet paper, stock up on Depends.
I eat lots of veggies, wear gloves to read my mail.
Read Facebook obsessively for each new detail
of what they tell us that we must and we must not do
to increase the odds that we will not catch this flu.

This virus has us isolated—true without a doubt,
so I guess I’ll look within since I can’t look without.
I’ll think about past lovers, then drag old albums out
to try to find more memories for me to think about.
While contemplating doomsday and plotting out our ends,
we might as well survey our lives and think about old friends.

Forget that crazy orange fool who tweets and  issues orders
concerning odds and planes and ships and hands and gloves and borders.
Go back to where we should have been, listening to sager folks
with science degrees and doctorates who are not human jokes.
And when the world’s restored to order, when walking past Trump Tower,
try to remember and take heed that nature has the power!

Give her due respect. Mind the oceans and the bees.
Stop fracking and pollution. Earth’s not there for you to seize.
Protect other species, for everything’s connected.
We are not meant to seize and own each thing we have selected.
If nature turns against us, it’s written in the plan.
When creating the natural world, the last thing made was man.

So less depends upon him in the natural way of things.
The world can do without the reordering he brings.
Already wild animals are taking over towns
as a single virus topples presidents and crowns.
We cannot use the atom bomb or missile, drone or gun.
If we wage war with Mother Nature, she’ll be the one who’s won!!!

Adi Wahid
Charles Postiaux
Ehud Neuhaus
Jordan Hopkins
Kyler Boone
Kenny Zhang

Writing prompts for the day are looking within, pass, isolation, overhaul and water.

All photos were posted on Unsplash and are used with permission.

This, Too?

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IMG_0791

This, Too?

In planning for a place remote,
considering a life afloat.
I might collaborate with friends
so we can meet communal ends
planning out a scheme for life
far away from pain and strife.

We’d set a mutual course on seas
far away from the disease
that snakes its way as it might please.

And having learned our lesson well,
we’d escape this landlocked Hell
and float in colonies off shore,
keeping at least  ten feet or more
apart until the curse was through
and we could start our lives anew.

But, alas, I have no yacht
and a sailor I am not,
So my sailing schemes are shot!

Instead, I’ll sail a sea of dreams
and face the threat landlocked, it seems!
So don’t drop in for a small visit.
A social life’s not healthy, is it?
I’ll pass my social life alone
chatting on the telephone

attired in my sleeping togs,
stroking the cats, patting the dogs,
communicating on my blogs

with all the humans I have left.
in a sequestered world bereft
of face-to-face and hip-to-hip,
let alone of lip-to-lip!!
This too shall pass, optimists say.
The world will see a brighter day.

We’ve survived aids, the plague and SARS,
global warming (so far) and cars.
We’re the universe’s superstars.

Prompt words today are remote, collaborate, lesson, course and snake.

Strangely enough, no matter how many times I center this poem, every other stanza wants to separate itself from the stanzas that precede and follow it. Strangely enough, it echoes the theme, so instead of trying to center it for the third time, I am just going to leave it as is.

Quietus

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Version 2

Quietus

As death came to unfold my hand,
you chose to stay and hold my hand,
so that this quietus, meant
to give the steam of life a vent
and calm the mighty wave of life,
was borne with a much lesser strife.

If we are meant to salvage nought
from all the riches life has brought.
(Not one single wild carousal
nor vestige of passion’s arousal.)
If death gives heed to no demand
and no relief from its remand,

then, at least, it seems most fit
that, before our life is quit,
we should have the comfort of
a single gentle press of love.
All, perhaps, that we can stand—
the forgiveness of a loved one’s hand.

Prompts today are hold my hand, carouse, quietus, salvage and wave.

 

High and Dry

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High and Dry

Who wouldn’t feel dejected being jilted by their lover?
It’s normal to be feeling that you might never recover.
Yet when it comes to  loving, let me give you this advice.
Too often love’s determined by the rolling of the dice.
It may come up all sevens or it may come up a bust,
but no matter what your luck is, it simply is a must
that every time you meet the jerk who hung you up to dry,
you have to act as though he is just another guy.
Exercise some sangfroid. Act happy and aloof.
I can guarantee it will send him through the roof.

 

Prompt words today are sangfroid, jilted, advice, aloof and recover.

Of course no one would ever jilt any of these irresistible women. This was a photo for a joint art show I did with three friends years ago. The show was titled, “Now Hanging,” thus the photo of the four of us hung up to dry…