Tag Archives: Word of the Day Challenge

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 It’s actually an outdated name for riboflavin (also known as lactoflavin and vitamin B2), a micronutrient found in bread and pasta.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.

Chasm

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Chasm

I flounce, you plod. You reach the crest
while I have chosen to stop and rest.

From far below, I scan the skies.
dreaming, as you supervise.

You are inflexible and frigid,
I the opposite of rigid.

As I wander here and there,
you search for me and tear your hair.

What tantrums over my transgressions
must be prompted by my digressions.

Comparable to day and night,
you are the darkness to my light.

This, dear, is the dichotomy—
the chasm between you and me.

 

Prompts for today are flounce, crest, supervise, comparable, tantrum, inflexible and dichotomy. Image from Unsplash.

Sea Shanty

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Sea Shanty

We dined upon quahaug clams, oysters and shrimp,
but the sauce tasted funny, the lettuce was limp,
and an onerous numbness in our lips and our legs
immediately suggested we’d been served the dregs
of a past morning’s catch, so we rued our selection
and sought out a mole to back up our detection
of who had slipped up and served us bad shellfish.
What entrepreneur was so greedy and selfish

that he’d risk our lives simply for filthy lucre?
We appealed to the waiters to provide some succor
and spurred on by our pleas and sizable tips,
they gave us proof that our angry sore lips
were the product of clams a few days past their prime,
so we sued that rude restauranteur for his crime.

He was found guilty and is now in the cooler
where if he’d been smarter and a little less crueler,
our clams would have been in the days before serving.
And we all agree no convict’s more deserving 
of a stay in the hoosegow, and because of our plight,
when we’re in a mood to go out for a bite,
we skip all the seafood joints, pass them right by
and go out for a burger or a nice meat pie.

 

prompt words are slip, selection, mole, dregs, quahaug, immediately and onerous. Image by Louis Hansel on Unsplash.

New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

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New Words Coined or Words Remembered?

To *neotorize a new word when you can’t find a rhyme
is not really playing fair, in fact it is a crime.
Surely any writer who is worth her salt
is expected to have words enough stored in her mental vault

so no errant *wyvern can abscond with them,
and fly them off to some tall tree, where, perched upon a limb,
he’ll breath fire, thus reducing all the words to ash,
dispensing all their fragments with a tremendous lash

of tail as he flies off again in a hunt bicoastal,
for words shared by any means: books, magazines or postal.
No honeyed tongue can save them once charred and ground to dust,
but still all words that they contained should be recalled and must

once more be written down so those words purloined and embered
by the next generation can be read and thus remembered.
No need to coin new words to express those thoughts once thought.
Better to recall the ones poets of old have wrought.

Hard enough to put them in the rows they once assumed.
Half the work is over once the old words are exhumed.
Why go to twice the work when half the work will do?
And best that once restored, you hide them from the wyvern’s view!!!!

 

*to neotorize is to coin new words, terms or expressions.
*a wyvern is a legendary creature with a dragon’s head and wings, a reptilian body.

Prompt words today are ash, abscond, expect, *neotorize, honey, *wyvern and  coastal

Shelled Sanctity

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Shelled Sanctity

This retreat for turtles in the mountains of Nepal
has the godliest turtles on our Earthly spinning ball.

See the holiest of holies in their tiny saffron robes,
doing daily meditations by pushing tiny globes

first eastward and then westward with a pointed beak,
defining piety by actions instead of how they speak.

See lurking in the shadows, a million tiny ants,
bending low to watch their passing, those tiny sycophants—

who profess to kiss the ground that the turtles walk upon,
but instead just make use of the paths they’ve made when they are gone.

Busy small collectors, they build layer upon layer
of food to nourish bodies, but murmur not a prayer

in thanks for what they’re given, for they know right well
proper thanks is being given by the Brothers of the Shell.

 

Prompts today are lurking, define, saffron, satirical, godliest, turtles and sycophant.

Rudely Interrupted

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Rudely Interrupted

Notwithstanding what the newspapers say, I am not capricious.
I merely have a questioning eye that’s oftentimes suspicious.

I found the blade and saw the blood and what I had surveyed
I felt was information that must be conveyed.

It’s true the entire police force was at once deployed
and also true the mayor was excessively annoyed 

that it was his summer barbecue  that was rudely stormed.
by the selfsame vice squad that he had lately formed.

Only to have them tell him when he did his yearly preps
for his fabled pig roast on his own front steps,

he should remove the grisly evidence lest neighbors be alarmed
that it might have been a human being that was harmed.

The mayor, truly irked at the action he’d incited,
resumed his annual picnic and I was not invited!!!

 

Prompts today are capricious, blade, survey, deploy, questioner, newspaper and notwithstanding. If you want to play along, the links to the prompt sites are under the prompt words. Image by Hassan Rafhaan on Unsplash.

Resolution

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Resolution

She refused to remain the underdog, tethered to her stanchion.
She’d trade her present hovel for a stately mansion.
She’d update all her fashions and tone her waist and thighs,
exercise with vigor to decrease her zaftig size.
She’d become more vivacious, more up on all the news.
She’d practice stealth and cunning in interpreting the clues
of what it took to rise up in the elite scene,
responsive to what it might take to be a social queen.
But alas, it never happened, for to her great sorrow,
she kept putting self-improvement off until tomorrow.

Prompt words today are mansion, update, responsive, stealth,  vivacious and underdog.

Isosceles

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Isosceles

A silly argument at best,
and yet it would not come to rest.
They simply could not seem to cease
their debate on “isosceles.”
They could not bring to a fruition
discussion on its definition.

He said the answer had to be
that the triangle had three
even sides, while she said two,
and they wondered what to do
to resolve their worrisome plight
and  determine who was right.

In every other prior fight,
there was a book to set them right,
yet while spring cleaning, they’d packed up
every book and dish and cup
to maintain their purity
with absolute surety.

But both of them thought it was ruthless
to remain unschooled and truthless
on this subject math-related
they so hotly had debated.
So in the end, they thought they must
unpack the boxes and chance the dust.

They placed the boxes around the border
in some semblance of neat order,
opening one, then two and three
to try to solve the mystery,
kneeling there on bended knee
to try to find some verity.

When finally they found the truth,
to be two sides, ’twas sad, foresooth,
that in the end, they found the fight
still had not been set to right,
for neither would admit to be
the one who had insisted three!

Prompt words today are wonder, prior, cleaning, semblance, isosceles, argument and purity.