Tag Archives: tall tale

A Semi-Tall Tale for The. Sunday Whirl Wordle 650 and NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 12

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Image by Satish Nagapuri on Unsplash
JDB Photo
JDB Photo

 

 

 A Semi-Tall Story

Once upon a time, dear friends, long before creation,
the spirits of the universe formed a delegation
to invent our ancestors: the cell  and then the fish,
and eons later, they decided to fulfill the wish
of the lowly haddock to wallow in the mud
with toes and feet to stay erect while walking through the crud.
And thus was born the dinosaur, king of a twig-strewn world,
crashing through the underbrush as all it touched unfurled.

Those parts of earth unbroken eventually gave birth
to animals less violent and much smaller in girth.
Warm-blooded, they awakened to divine memory,
invented words and realized that what had come to be
was what the spirits of the universe had foreseen long ago
while looking in a crystal ball. The predicted it, and lo,
that chain occurred unbroken—ending with you and me,
sitting here upon the ledge of infinity. 

 

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 650, the prompt words are: twigs divine wake blood wallow cell memory ancestors crystal creation ledge unbroken.  I am combining this prompt with the NaPoWriMo prompt from two days ago, which I forgot to do.  The 12th prompt of the monthly series was to write a tall story. This one is only tallish as it’s based on evolution. The Spirits of the Universe might qualify as the tall part of the tale.

A Suitable Ending

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A Suitable Ending

He made a wild adventure out of every act
as his imagination embellished every fact.
No detail insignificant in his lackluster life,
his tall tales irked his children and perplexed his wife.
Each plash became a tidal wave. Trips to the zoo were germinal—
fomenting tales of tigers on safaris nearly terminal.
His day would come, they warned him, but he was a stubborn bloke.
He thrived on spinning yarns  and on concocting his next joke.
They always said they’d do him in—those wild tales he spun.
And in the end, his kin were right. He choked on a bad pun.

Prompts today are tiger, insignificant, perplex, plash and terminal.

Family Legend: Wordle 527

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Family Legend

Frozen solid as a bone,
His icy breath drew sparks from stone.
The only man to walk alone
through that icy Arctic zone,
his legend spread from door to door,
window to window, shore to shore.

Few there were who did not know
how he enchanted friend and foe
with tales of how he wandered, clueless,
through the snow, coatless and shoeless.,
sparking fire with his breath
that saved him from a frigid death.

Scraping the moss beneath the snow
to build a fire, in its glow,
he brewed a soup of ptarmigan
devoured it, and when he was done,
 took the feathers of the fowl
to weave a cape with shirt and cowl

that protected him from wind and snow
for that short distance he had to go
until the wintry blast relented
and he reached that valley scented
with aromas of spring flowers,
waving grass and leafy bowers,

found the  spring with steaming spout
that warmed him up and thawed him out.
Relieved his feet that had gone shoeless
until they were warm and blueless.
Thus reads the legend of the man.
Try to believe it if you can.

This is the tale that I have heard,
fantastic and wholly absurd.
It’s up to you  to wonder why
any shoeless naked guy
could survive this ordeal without dying.
Could it be my Gramps was lying?

Today’s Wordle prompt words are: stone, few, sparks, icy, spread, breath, clue, legend, enchanted, feather and scented.

 

For the Sunday Whirl  Wordle #527