Tag Archives: the daily spur

Quilting Bee

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Mask quilt by Deanna Taylor
The good, the bad and the ugly. All part of life’s crazy quilt.
Pieces ready to be joined
Broken thoughts
African motif quilt by Deanna Taylor
Detail from mask quilt
This is a lovely poem written by my friend Isidro and painted on my wall. It is his version of a story I’d earlier written entitled “In Mexico There is Always Music.” We all keep contributing to each others’ stories.

(Click on photos to enlarge and to read the rest of the story.)

Quilting Bee

I chop my life up into bits, incongruous and varied:
struggles, victories, tragic loves, the day that I got married.
Clashes create beauty as pains mix up with cheers,
making a lovely pattern as each new piece appears.

In stories as in patchwork quilts, all bits are not roses.
Part of the beauty comes from the pain that it exposes.
We put our art together, fragment after patch
and no pattern emerges if all the pieces match.

A convenient truth of works of art as well as that of life:
beauty’s found in perfection, but also found in strife.
Sweet berries come with brambles and each rose has its thorn.
Both great passion and great pain predate the time we’re born.

Perhaps pain is the awful price that we have to pay
to experience the pleasure of when it goes away.
So with the ugly fabric that finds a place to fit
when contrasting beauty is stitched in next to it.

Life is a lovely story, but not all of it is writ.
Why were we created if not to add to it?
In taking all the pieces we’re provided with,
We take part in creation by adding to the myth.

 

 

Prompts today are patterns, chop, clashes, cheer, incongruous, convenient and brambles.

Family Secrets

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Family Secrets

The mayor’s precious daughter has that certain glow,
but why the groom is deadpan, no one will ever know.
That he prefers the maid of honor is the murky truth,
but to show his real emotions he knows would be uncouth.

Hand-picked by her father to assure his re-election,
this young man of fine lineage was an obvious selection.
He should have put his foot down, but their fathers were best friends
and his marriage to another would not meet those families’ ends.

So when future generations question Grandpa’s look
as they rifle through the pages of the family photo book,
they’ll guess the bachelor party had gone on for too long,
affecting the groom’s fitness and his wedding get-along.

Only two will ever know the real truth of the tale.
First, the maid of honor who smoothed her best friend’s veil,
and secondly the groom, who when he kissed the bride
imagined he was kissing the one who stood beside.

 

Prompt words today are glow, deadpan, election, murky, mayor, prefer and precious. Image from Pinterest.

Whirl

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Whirl

The rumor is that I will fall for anything in pants,
but it’s a reputation I only gained by chance.
It really isn’t warranted, for I must feel a spark.
I’m not apt to woo anyone merely for a lark.

I’m just giving feedback, though it’s really no big deal,
of how I earned my reputation on a Ferris wheel.
I went up as a single, but after a spin or two,
another swinging single came into my view.

He was a mere acquaintance. I’d seen him once or twice
on a barstool at the tavern, and I thought him very nice.
I was a mere scrap of a girl, and he was big and burly.
He had a classic profile and his smile was wide and pearly.

My second spin around the wheel, I gave the smile of smiles,
hoping I could interest him with my girlish wiles.
It must have worked for on my very next time going round,
I saw that fellow standing on the boarding mound.

The spinning stopped while they removed my safety bar and he
climbed right in beside me and turned his smile on me.
I don’t know the legality. Is love a bonafide
excuse to board new people in the middle of a ride?

I do not know the answer, but I know for sure it worked,
and when the safety bar went on and that big wheel jerked
me up into the air again, I never rued the stop,
for we were locked in our first kiss before we reached the top.

Although I started solo, we came to earth a pair.
I had found my next true love way up there in the air,
proving it once and for all that romance may be found
even in a swinging cage fifty feet off the ground.

And while the whole experience prompted jubilation,
it had a negative effect on my reputation.
So though I still find rides upon the Ferris wheel are neato,
I arrive there fully masked and I ride incognito!

 

Prompts for the day are incognito, feedback, spark, acquaintance, scrap, Ferris wheel and legality. Image by Juliana Malta on Unsplash

Doorways

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Doorways

Dreams do not circumscribe, but let us wander forth and back,
defying time to travel through memory’s broad crack.

The profile of the present vanishes in rapid transit
without asking us if we are in the shape to chance it.

Our minds’ stately mansions turn to crackerboxes when
that unconscious part of us has a wild yen

to plunge us back into the past to deal with problems there
for which our earlier life gave us scant time to prepare.

Time and again we have the chance to live our lives in dreams,
resolving problems in a manner our subconscious deems

to be healthy solutions to what didn’t work before.
It is as though the elements opened up a door

and let us wander back again through time and distance vast
to give us all a second chance to rectify the past.

Reminding us that our old sorrows were not meant to last,
revising slightly all those roles to which we have been cast.

Time that once sifted slowly rushes through the hourglass,
assuring us of that set truth: that this, too, shall pass.

 

Prompts today are time travel, transit, profile, circumscribe, healthy, crackerbox and element. First photo by jdb, hourglass by Aron Visuals on Unsplash.

Traviesa

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Traviesa

My dog just ate my wood carving and that is why I need to vent.
Although I have looked everywhere, I can’t find its equivalent.
Sometimes she’s angelic, but at other times a pest.
I’ll leave it up to you which version I like best.

When she’s hushed and loving I fear that I’m forgetful
of all the other times when she’s mischievous and fitful.
I get up and go over to give her a fond pet,
but when I do I step upon a spot that’s slick and wet

and realize that once again she’s had a little pee
in a spot here in the living room she knows that I can’t see
when seated at my writing desk. My back to where she’s been,
I cannot be a witness to her most recent sin.

I know her name is Zoe, but too often I forget
the name that has been given to my most recent pet.
So I call her “Traviesa,” which pops into memory
for  “naughty girl” is what she is most frequently.

 

Prompts today are wet, fitful, angelic, equivalent, quotation, wood carving and hush.

 

Canine Grazers

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Canine Grazers

Perhaps it is genetic, this digging in the lawn.
By the time I catch them at it, they look up and they are gone.
I view the damage they have done, and although it is bad,
it’s not as worrisome as the snacks that they have had
burrowing into the soil, moist and rich and black.
The vet says eating soil to gain the nutrients they lack.

I buy them special dogfood, give them cereal for snacks,
buy various healthy dog chews by the box and by the sacks,
but still I view them digging, noses shrouded by the grass.
First just one and then they mine my lawn for sustenance en masse.
Must I invest in stanchions to keep their heads erect
so they’ll only consume the healthy food that I select?

But then I see that Zoe has something in her mouth.
When I move north to see what it may be, she zigzags south,
but finally she gasps for air, releasing something squirmy—
something rolled into a ball, but definitely wormy!
I beat her to the draw and scoop the huge grub up.
Quite a complete mouthful for such a little pup.

I took its picture with my phone and flushed it down the loo,
then tried to figure out the next thing I should do.
They’d infested all my garden, all their feeding sites turned brown,
and much as I despise taking any creature down,
the bacteria they carried could be harmful for a tummy
that could not resist them ’cause they tasted so damn yummy.

I Google it and hours later, finally I find 
that they were a garden grub of the cutworm kind.
Coffee grounds and and eggshells might curb enthusiasms
for these juicy creatures that were cause for all the chasms,
and yet they’d just move elsewhere so I’m off to find cure
that will lead to a solution calculated to endure.

At least the mystery is solved, though still without solution
until I find a natural means that will not cause pollution
that will seep into the water or the tummies of my kids.
A beneficial nematode that doesn’t harm, yet rids
my grass of all these chewers that in turn are being chewed
by dogs-o-mine who’ve discovered they make a yummy food!

Prompts today are soil, viewers, gasp, shroud, cereal, stanchion and genetic. All photos by jdb

 

Luminous

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Luminous

He surely struck the bullseye when he razed his squalid hovel
and starting out with little else than hammer, saw and shovel,
he raised a lovely edifice seven stories high,
an apartment building most pleasing to the eye.

Making not a single blunder, all the work that he put in
transformed a former eyesore into a brilliant win.
Luminous and shining, this glorious property
became a local landmark that people came to see.

Those who sought to live there were multiform and varied,
for folks of every background loved the energy it carried.
It was a living monument to industry and wit,
qualities reflected in the folks who lived in it.

 

The prompts today are luminous, bullseye, win, blunder, multiform, apartment building and hovel.

The hand-forged hammer in the illustration was my father’s. Its handle is covered in leather rings. It is one of my most treasured objects.

Eyeing my Neighbor’s Sandwich in the School Cafeteria

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Eyeing my Neighbor’s Sandwich in the School Cafeteria

Since they garnisheed Dad’s wages, we’ve been bleary-eyed and passive.
The influence on our diet, in short, has been most massive.
Sister has a headache and mother’s getting thin.
My football playing brother has no energy to win.
His lack of skill’s been vindicated by the fact that he
was relegated to a diet riboflavin-free.
For since Dad has no wages, there’s no money to buy bread,
so dandelion greens are what we’re grazing on instead.
Since vitamin g is what we have been missing in our diet,
if you don’t like that sandwich, do you think that I could try it?

I know. A really bad poem, but hope I am “vindicated” when you view what the prompt words were: Prompt words for today were bleary, passive, win, vitamin g, vindicated and garnishment.Illustration thanks to Chic Young.

Note:

Vitamin G isn’t a term you’ll hear very much anymore. It’s actually an outdated name for riboflavin (also known as lactoflavin and vitamin B2), a micronutrient found in bread and pasta. Riboflavin is an easily absorbed micronutrient that plays a key role in maintaining health in humans and animals. It is required for a wide variety of cellular processes and is very important in getting energy from the foods we eat. Studies have shown that riboflavin may play a role in the prevention and/or treatment of iron-deficiency anemia, carpal tunnel syndrome, cataracts, migraines and rosacea (a skin disease). And recent research has found that riboflavin is one of three vitamins involved in the regulation of circadian (daily) rhythms, because it helps to activate some light-sensitive cells in the retina of the eye and synchronize our daily biological rhythms with the light.

Forced Celebration

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Forced Celebration

As they frogmarched their prisoner into the room,
uncountable candles dispelled the gloom.
A pervading odor of sugar and wax
was entrenched in the air around piles and stacks
of brightly wrapped boxes of variable sizes,
yet she was not swayed by potential surprises.
Soothing smiles of friends and the song they were singing
were tangential to thoughts that were wildly zinging
through her mind, for in short, she did not find it nifty
that this was the day that she would turn fifty!!!

Prompts today are frogmarch, variable, soothing, entrench, pervading, candle and tangential. Image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.

Imitating Grandma

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Imitating Grandma

In my grandma’s pleasant house,
dressed up in her peasant blouse,
a towel stuffed in to form a lump
to imitate her dorsal hump,
I tried to imitate her waddle
and her propensity to dawdle,
offering morsels from her cookie jar,
as she watched me from afar.

With not a filament of shame,
I went about my childish game,
beaming as I played the gimp,
miming her arthritic  limp.
In my innocent portrayal
was the cruelest betrayal.
The family knew the shame was mine,
but as I toddled down the line

of people who filled up the room,
I gloried to the cheerful boom
of Grandma’s laugh as she piped up
to save this youngest clueless pup
from the shame I might have felt
if she had not approached and knelt
down next to me, gathering in
this cruel mime, absolving sin.

And though I thought the final line
would surely be a quip of mine,
aping her halting foreign speech
as I tried to avoid her reach,
she gathered me in loving hug
and giving an indulgent shrug,
said, “Forgive her, for she’s only three
and gets her sense of humor from me!”

 

Prompts today are dawdle, (love that word) mine, peasant, filament, morsel, beaming and portrayal. Image from the internet.