Tag Archives: The Sunday Whirl

“Hearts” For The Sunday Whirl 375

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Hearts

Hearts on hooks sweep back and forth
from east to west to south to north,
hung on chains where they are caught,
dizzy from what fate has wrought.
While other shocked hearts steam and swell,
 bound tight to sticks in their own hell.
Whether held by chain or stock,
hearts the world over feel the shock
while you, I hope, possess a heart
that’s been free from the very start.

For The Sunday Whirl 735 the prompts are: hook sway hearts strip chain dizzy sweep you stick swell steam shock

Hoarding Pennies, For The Sunday Whirl Wordle (Wordless?) 734

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The rain lies hidden in the clouds, ready to rinse from this day my guilt for all of those words I imagined I would finally foster––drawing them out from that thick thicket of memory where they have hung for fifty years, waiting to explode. Sorted  one-by-one into piles, each lies like a single undetonated bomb, barely ticking after all these years, ready for me to sink into them to stage that final act by which they will earn their freedom. I am a criminal of omission––that fake author of the lessons they might teach. Fearing their truth or perhaps their half-truths, I hoard them  now like worthless pennies in their stacks. Too late, too late I fear, to spend them.

Below is a photo of the manuscript I started 50 years ago, at its present stage. Behind are piled the research, letters, notes and timelines I have assembled to attempt to bring the manuscript up to the present. I have come to an isolated spot in Quintana Roo for a month to do so, but I fear the daunting deed might go undone! Laziness or an inability to face the truths and to deal with them again, after all these years? Three weeks to go. Time will tell.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 734, the  prompts are: rinse days still thicket bomb fake criminal imagine foster lies sky sink First two images done aided by AI, third photo my own.

Holding On Together, for The Sunday Whirl

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Holding On Together
Greed, despair and tragedy need not rule our lives,
so long as that calm part of us holds on and survives.
(That presence that walks with us on those hard journeys where
evil seems to stalk us from within its fiendish lair.)
For at each of its stages, Earth has held it all:
both vibrating heart strings that heed the spirit’s call
as well as those demonic fiends that seem to be in power,
issuing their edicts from whichever tower 
they’ve chosen to reign from, be they palaces of stone
or White Houses half demolished that they claim to own.
These despots or these presidents, these potentates or kings
seem to concentrate their power in edicts and in things,
whereas those below them go on living their lives
by concentrating on the kindness that survives
and which we show each other in our living day-to-day,
hoping that the nightmare will soon fade away.

This is my very favorite quote and I have paraphrased it a hundred times. Here is the actual quote:

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.” ~ Will Durant

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle  the prompt words are:
greed tragedy despair presence walk calm strings earth all spirit vibrating heart
Images created with the help of AI…the best that I could do.

Final Message

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Final Message
For Bob

They echo in my memory, those footsteps heard in that early hour the morning after you left.  The creak of the floor board outside my door as I lay rooted to my bed, waiting for the door to open. Years after, that last sound of you loops in my memory.  “Send a sign,” I said, just before I heard your footsteps stir the early morning silence as you shared a sound of you, if not one final look, before you slipped away.

 

For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: rooted years footsteps creaks look stir hour loop clock echo before slips

Sunset of Memory for The Sunday Whirl Wordle

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Sunset of Memory

This lack  of memory plagues my world:
words I can’t remember,
Ideas that once fired my life
have faded down to ember.

It is a cruel injustice
that my thoughts have been arrested.
They escape me daily
as my memory is bested.

So, although throughout my life,
my strength has been the word,
suddenly they desert me
and my life’s become absurd.

My faith in unity of words
and mind has come undone,
and, I fear, is fading
with the setting of the sun.

 

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 730 the prompt words are: ideas remember words plague escape faith strength unity through arrest cruelty injustice

And, for Times Change prompt, as well.

Tick-Tock, for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 729

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My Grandmother’s clock

Tick-Tock

Back when there was magic,
before the world was broken,
in my childhood’s comfy nest,
the major language spoken
is remembered as a ghost of words
blown in on a breeze.
Life was one great treasure,
set out for us to seize.

The last war newly over, 
the news of the time
seemed to tell of happenings
peaceful and benign.
No need for bomb shelters
or ICE or interventions.
My childhood passed most peacefully,
mainly free of tensions.

Time seemed to drag on slowly
from birthday to Halloween.
There seemed to be a hundred years
between toddler and teen.
But now that I am 78, life whizzes by as though
it’s making up for all those years when it passed by so slow.
And peace that in my innocence I thought would always last
has become just a memory of an idyllic past.

 

 

 

for The Sunday Whirl 729  the prompt words are: magic back broken nest seems drag news breeze life ghost need tell

New Führer, for The Sunday Whirl

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Getty Image

Given the task of writing with no set prescribed topic, my mind always goes to stories of the past. It serves them up like medicine—a treasured dose that blows away the control of a world too bent on bad news. They trigger gratitude for a simpler world that had recently dispensed with Hitler’s threat. Our country had regained control of the world, along with a union of nations bent on peace and the worth of every man, no matter what color or nationality or faith—practices seventy years later again considered something to prompt a shooting match with bigger guns as a new führer (this time our own) practices his strength, his guns aimed at whom? Next time, perhaps you. Perhaps me.

Words for the Sunday Whirl were: serve medicinal gratitude mind triggers blow control shoot practice treasure you stories

Dream Diary for The Sunday Whirl

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Dream Diary

Tattered strips of memory are so easily forgotten,
be they draped in velvet or wound in filmy cotton.
Yet moments revealed in our dreams may spin us back in time
to an earlier period when we were in our prime.
The sound track of our dreaming, be it jazz or rock or rap
be it lullaby or roar, may serve us as a map
putting us in touch with times we’ve chosen to forget—
showing just the tip of an iceberg we’d regret
to see the submerged truth of, preferring to recall
just what we have chosen, not remembering it all.

 

 

Words for the Sunday Whirl are: draped moment velvet reveal tips jazz touch back roar filmy strips forgotten

Graffiti, for The Sunday Whirl

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Graffiti

Some viewers lift their glasses and drink to genius that
gave birth to every brush stroke. Each dribble and each splat.
They say these shocking images awaken us to see
much more than just one artist’s route to immortality.

Others blame the artist who has had the gall
to spray art uninvited upon a public wall.
They say raw art does nothing to put out raging fires.
Solutions to world problems are not what art inspires.

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl are: drinks fire wake catastrophe shocking say social drastic world art raw blame

Minds Like Mine, for The Sunday Whirl, Sept 14, 2025

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Minds
like mine
are bound to
slip away into the
swells, blown away
through cracks in time
to  where a poem dwells.
Fans of verse   may lure me
into sitting on a  fence picking
bones of words that together make
no sense. I sort them into towers, then
grasp more words to  build trapped words
in frosted pyramids with messages well-chilled.

The Sunday Whirl words are: bound slip swells fan luring fence cracks bone tower frosted trap grasps

The photo, taken by me, is of a snow-covered venting volcano.