Tag Archives: Wordle

Scotch Plaid: Wordle 533

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Scotch Plaid

A bloke’s
a joke
when clad
in plaid.
Girls don’t tarry
with guys so merry.
They suppose
such garish clothes
best suit a zone
for golf alone—
a sporting life
lived void of wife.

A plaid-swathed guy
might well let fly
a golf ball and
wind up in sand,
his drive a flub
made with a club,
his signal “Fore!”
a senseless roar,
or perhaps see,
there on the tee,
his ball still sitting
devoid of hitting.

A ball unfired
is best retired
to join a club
that is a pub
where scotch on ice
will suffice.
No more balls fired,
golf clubs retired,
that vest of plaid
doesn’t suit a lad
who is, I think,
best suited to drink.

For such a lad, I think it’s best
to drink the scotch and ditch the vest.

Prompt words for Wordle 533 are: signal, drive, plaid, lone, life, joke ice, fire, club, merry, fly and join

The Arts: Wordle 531

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Click on photos to enlarge views.

The Arts

Do stories flutter round your head and brush your ears with wings?
Do words sift down like embers and ignite sparks in things?
Do crystal visions in your eyelids scare away the blues?
Do new rhythms lift your spirits and install taps on your shoes?
Do staffs of music fall like rain to shift your mode of thinking?
Fall like water from the sky until you feel you’re sinking
into overtures of gratitude for what life has been giving:
words  and music, art and dance  that make your life worth living.

 

flutter stories haunt spark lift words wing staff shift water gratitude crystal

 

For  Sunday Whirl Wordle 531

Summer Block Party: The Sunday Whirl Wordle 530

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Summer Block Party

So many trillion burning stars form the signs of night.
Most of them so secret that they are out of sight.

Others are so numerous, they form a sort of haze,
spreading out a Milky Way at which we like to gaze,

lying spread-eagled in the grass, during summer nights,
cockleburrs’ sharp edges and mosquito bites.

The chattering of mothers on our screened front porch,
feline yowls and dog barks, Father’s questing torch,

seeking out the faucet to turn the water off.
A roar of laughter from the men, a smoker’s raucous cough.

All the familiar voices of our little hive—
the neighborhood we live in, cozy and alive.

All the roles we choose to fill united for this night
when the stars have chosen to bless us with their light.

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle 530  The prompt words are: edge, stars, roar, burn, role, chatter, hive, sign, feline, curse, haze, secret. Image by Andy Holmes on Unsplash.

School Discipline in Transylvania: The Sunday Whirl, Nov 30, 2021

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School Discipline in Transylvania

The screen door bangs. I’m off to school
where the teachers think they rule,
but I think I see signs of worry
on my teacher as I hurry
into class and take my seat.
Already, he displays defeat

before the spit wads take their toll,
betraying who is in control.
A first and then a second wad
sails through the air and towards his bod.
He lifts his face to the attack,
then calmly turns to show his back.

He writes his name and then the date,
then waits for missiles to abate.
Sucks in his breath and turns around
to silence. There is not a sound
as shooters wilt and drop their ammo,
reacting to our teacher’s whammo.

It’s like a screen lifts from his face,
his old self gone without a trace,
a second visage in its place.
His eyes are bulging out in space,
his forehead furled beneath his bangs,
his teeth protruding out like fangs,

like a vampire’s wont to do,
his face a sickly pallid hue.
His fingers curl into long claws,
occasioning a longer pause.
Hushed silence reigns. Lectures begin.
This teacher has great discipline!!!!

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle, the words are : control, worry, school, see, face, date, screen, shooter, attack, sucks and second. Image by Tra Nguyen on Unsplash.

Extra! Extra! Forget All About it!!! (Sunday Whirl Wordle 529)

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Extra! Extra! Forget All About it!!!

Once daily papers split the air, landing with a “plop”
on each house’s stairway, two steps from the top.
Truth was dispensed each morning for a price tag nearly free—
a neatly packaged bundle wherein we all could see
how the engine of the world moved forward bit by bit,
and the shiny torch of journalism helped us witness it.

But while we strove for justice and fairness and the truth,
other forces in the world were fighting nail and tooth,
trying to pollute the facts, and we all know why.
They were simply greedy for their share of the pie.
Did fair reporting save the day? Blind justice serve us all?
Or is it now too late to try to save us from our fall?

Rhetoric now flies freely at us through the air.
No more is it delivered daily to our stair.
Any mother’s son expounds with words twisted and ruthless,
all too often based on hate with logic cruel and truthless.
Words winging through the internet too easily meet our eyes
without the screen of logic to filter out the lies.

Reality is now for sale, scripted and rewritten,
that phony glamorous almost-world with which we all are smitten.
Our politicians, movie stars and buffoons playing roles
all have ulterior motives and short-sighted goals
wherein they build their egos, getting richer year by year,
and news of it just fades away into the atmosphere.

 

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 529 are free, papers, morning, price, wings, split, truth, shiny, engine, witness, why and strive. Top illustration by Melpo Tsiliaki, bottom illustration by Logan Weaver, both on Unsplash.

Yin, Yang and the Sea: Sunday Swirl Wordle 528

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This boy hand casting his line seemed to be either saluting or cursing the ocean.

Yin, Yang and the Sea

The sea strikes turquoise dissonance, then shhhsh’s it away,
releasing all the tension pent up by the day.
It speaks an easy language as it rolls along the bay,
but as often as it visits, we know it will not stay.

One by one, the waves roll in, devoid of parity.
They cannot seem to achieve any regularity.
With macho strokes of fury, they claw at rocks and beach,
gouging out in anger all that they can reach,
then turning female, lap the sand with gentle licks of tongue,
smoothing all the sand back that formerly it flung. 

The sea spreads riches on the beach, then takes them back again.
Theme after theme played out here in a continual spin.
Smoothing and then rippling, blue deepening to black,
all the sea might take away, one day it will bring back.

For the Sunday Swirl Wordle 528, the prompts are: turquoise, dissonance, tension, easy, one, female, shh, with, stay, themes, release, speaks

 

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

Word Witch: Sunday Whirl Wordle 526, Nov 7, 2021

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Word Witch

Secrets I have kept for years,
known only by my closest peers,
have been exposed again, it seems,
recovered from my deepest dreams.

I blink my eyes. Words come to light.
I tap my toes and they take flight,
perch on the page to paint a scene,
attract more words to go between.

Words meeting words, no more alone,
flesh to flesh and bone to bone,
in a sort of minuet,
mesh with words that they’ve just met.

They are the stuff of darkest night,
a glass that shatters in the light
filled with words that I drink in.
These words reveal where I have been,

and maybe where I’m going to—
word by word and clue by clue,
a sample of what I have hidden
that comes alive when it is bidden.

I quaff some more, this lust for word
and word and word grown most absurd.
A’s and M’s and L’s and Z’s
flow from my lips onto the keys.

Too soon I know that I will wake.
Exposed to light, the glass will break,
the words it holds evaporating,
ones that might have come abating.

Is it witchcraft or illusion?
My soul alone or in collusion?
We cannot know if words it gave us
are what damn us or what save us.

The prompt words are glass, blink, words, alone, paint, eyes, tap, secret, light, years, meeting and sample.

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 526

 

The Haunting: Wordle 525. Happy Halloween

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The Haunting

When bells toll at midnight, the chiming of each bell
signals that the scarlet one has begun the knell
to release the ghoulish souls and all the bats of Hell!

They seep up through our floorboards and wait for light of day,
twist themselves into our minds as we helpless lay,
toying with our dreaming as they pause along the way.

They seek out the damp corners everywhere they go,
trying to relieve the parch of the fires below,
cooling off scorched spirits in the river’s flow.

As a sort of trial, they may choose a wild horse,
winding bony fingers through its mane, they guide its course,
streaming through the heather and leaping over gorse.

But when dusk comes to dim the sun and tuck away the light,
it is the time for spirits to begin their fearsome flight
and the frightening of humans will become their main delight.

Then as children mime their horrors while going trick-or-treating,
when they see a darker shadow or hear a wild heart beating,
they may feel more evil presences in spirits they are meeting.

As they go door-to-door or wander a dark lane,
they may detect the real creatures that they seek to feign,
and feel a certain horror that they can’t explain.

So, children out on Halloween, heed each one that you meet.
Be sure the ghoulish one you pass really just wears a sheet,
and remember that a human ghost will be possessed of feet!

 

These are the prompt words for Wordle 525: ring, scarlet, light, damp, fright, trick, chime, bat, floor, ghoulish, trial.

Weekend Warriors: Wordle 524

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Weekend Warriors

As they mark off  the no man’s land with flags and chalk,
they warn their young brother he’d better not balk.
Then, battle lines drawn, my young monsters are off.
They huzzah and bellow and threaten and scoff.

As side one counts the time off,  twos drop to their knees
behind bushes and tables and boulders and trees.
Then, a hundred count reached, the enemy searches
the ditches and culverts and elm tees and birches.

Crows rise from the trees to caw and to hover,
betraying  those hidden and blowing their cover.
They rise then from where they’ve been crouching or sitting,
to begin their maneuvers of feinting and flitting.

Hiders still in hiding feel a hand on the nape
of their necks, that touch foiling their hope of escape.
Prisoners are taken and armies change places.
Hunted become hunters, continuing chases.

Over and over, this course is repeated.
Loser becomes winner but then is defeated.
Until one-by-one, they all are called home,
and the battleground’s empty below the night dome.

Star after star replaces the ranks
of small weekend soldiers and make-believe tanks.
They fall under covers, their moms tuck them in,
the dreams of their conquests now set to begin.

Prompt words today are battle, drop, sit, young, cover, monster, chase, table, count, times, zone and flags.

For the Sunday Whirl Wordle 524.
Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash