NaPoWriMo Day 17 :
The prompt: Today we were to write a poem making use of three of the five senses.
This poem has been removed from my blog as a stipulation of its entry in a poetry competition.
NaPoWriMo Day 17, Moving the Divan
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Tag Archives: writing
NaPoWriMo Day 14: The Meeting Place
The Meeting Place
What are you waiting for––
divine inspiration?
Do you think Shakespeare waited for his muse?
And if your muse came,
would you even recognize her?
Will she wear long white flowing robes?
Will she play a lute or will your voice
be her instrument?
Will she whisper in your ear or speak to you
though your mind?
And will she be beautiful or will that even matter?
As you age will your muse age with you
or is she perpetually young?
And what about wisdom?
Will it be your own acquired wisdom or hers
that will make your words cut like a knife
though the soft texture of days,
that will give them purpose
when those around you
fail and fall
into the magnetic cloud
of forgetfulness or boredom?
What if as you sit there
waiting for your muse,
watching reality TV
or doing crossword puzzles,
your muse is waiting for you
in the keys of your computer
or in your pen point?
What if she has been lolling all these years
in the pages
of that lined notebook
sitting empty on your shelf?
I keep telling you
that every day I see her
pass behind you
as you pine for her,
always looking
in the opposite
direction.
The prompt today was to write a poem in which every sentence, except for the last one, is in the form of a question.
NaPoWriMo, Day 10: Neo Burma-Shave Ads
Our prompt today was to write a poem advertising poetry. The third one is not quite an ad, but it has the cadence.
Neo Burma-Shave Ads
Make your words
both scan and rhyme.
Writing poetry’s
not a crime!
Get a seed of thought
and sow it.
Once it grows,
you’ll be a poet!
Robert Frost at the Movies
Robert’s poems
scanned and rhymed.
His meter? Even
and well-timed.
Yet when he tripped
on slippery tile
and dropped his
poems in a pile,
the usher hissed
in tones most vile
to get his “feet”
out of the aisle!
NaPoWriMo Day 7: Fidelity
Our prompt today was to write a love poem.
Fidelity
Each morning when I wake
to shrill alarm or sweet bird song,
depending upon the requirements of my day,
you are the first to greet my opening eyes.
You rest there on the pillow next to me
in the bed where first I, then you,
have fallen to sleep the night before
too soon, too soon,
before half our words were said.
After a quick trip to the john,
it is the first stroke of my fingers
that bring you finally to life.
Your countenance lights up
and the same love words
I revealed to you last night
are returned to me.
My hands caress
and new words come easily
first to me, then to you.
I touch gently all
your fine smoothness,
getting back
everything that I give
equal measure,
continuing our long love story
of give and take
as I shift your light frame onto my lap
to stroke your separate parts
from question mark to exclamation point.
Could a PC ever rouse this passion in me?
No way, MacBook Air. Thou art my love!
(I forgot to mention before that this love poem was to be written to an inanimate object. My love affair with Macs has extended over 30 years—from my very first floppy disk table model to my new love…the ultralight MacBook air.)
Sabor de Mexico
Sabor de México
The weaving of the inside of the palapa roof forms an exotic herringbone––in places its pattern interrupted by a patch of pale blue sky where the palm fronds have been eaten away by wind and rain. We are nine gathered around the table: eight women and one man. We sit writing in theme books, on typing paper, small notebooks or computers. Three of the four computers are Apples, a testament to my firm belief that this is the best computer for the artistic mind. Something about it is instinctual—which is right up my alley.
Alleys are something lacking in this town of small palapas and concrete houses. Neighbors back onto neighbors. Chickens have no dirt pathway to cross between properties, but jump from one shared fencepost into either yard: the one they belong in or the one they choose to go into. More often than not, no fence separates the spaces between houses. Here, privacy is not a big issue. The sounds of life float from street through window, uniting the visitor unwise enough to live in a house fronting on the main street in town with a night full of ATV’s, motorcycles, loud bands and tape players, air brakes, raucous shouts of those vacating bars at closing time.
The time between the night’s last departures and the next morning’s first arrivals is but an hour or two. Every morning I am awakened by the blasting of radios turned full volume and shared via rolled-down windows of pickup trucks and cars. It is a harsher form of the church bells that serve the same function in my village in the interior of Mexico. Who would need to be asleep later than 6:30? Who could be complained to if I were so foolish as to register any complaint?
Senses in Mexico are there to be stimulated. The patterns of shadows thrown by palms, bright colors, the bite of salsa and tequila, sounds formerly mentioned, the grit of sand underfoot, the sting of saltwater on sunburned arms and backs, the smell of tamarind and lime and the rotting blowfish on the beach. All senses mingle in a salad that we all taste from the common bowl. Whether we live here or visit here for months or weeks or hours, we take our few bites or many according to the time we have to digest them.
Poem written after the Celebration of Life for Nina and Eduardo
The ceremony for Eduardo and Nina was full of the loving thoughts of friends, details about their lives given from many perspectives, a few tears but even more laughter from remembering the good times. It was only on the road home that the contrasts in the peaceful happy setting I saw around me and the events of a week before hit me. The first lines of this poem ran over and over again through my thoughts and I had to pull over by the side of the road and write this poem. Part of me wonders if it is exploitative to write about this sad event, but I’ve found that many of my writer friends who were friends of Nina and Eduardo have been driven to do the same. It is as though I no longer know how to think about things unless I do so through my writing or my art. Somehow, the only way to process a hard truth of life is to make use of it creatively and to try to create a message that makes sense even though the deed never will.
After the Ceremony: Driving Home
The streets are filled
With ice cream and cerveza
and the wildly patterned legs
of senoritas.
It is a day
of sunlight and red flowers
and fuschia flowers and blue.
A slight wind
strums the swaying branches
of the palms,
but no other sounds
compete with the passing hum
of oncoming traffic streaming
from the city to our shores,
seeking safety, quiet,
the gentle lap of water against willow,
hypnotic bobbing of the pelicans
between the undulating liria––
a lazy day away
from the cares of urban life.
I pull to the side of the road to watch
these visitors to our world.
Have they not heard or
have they just forgotten
the breaking glass,
the knife, the club,
the red screams
slicing the midnight air?
The ones who were the screamers
are very quiet now––
part of the calmness
of this afternoon.
Their darkness
is dispersed by sunlight.
Yet all of their fear and pain––
the terror of their leaving––
now gone from them,
is kept like a souvenir
within the hearts of friends
whose turn it is to remember
for a while what we, too,
had forgotten.
Our happy world
lies like a blanket
over a bed made messy
by pain and loss.
It is the world’s bed,
and deny it as we will,
we all have lain in it
and will again.
–Judy Dykstra-Brown February 24, 2014
What Do You See? (Please Comment)
Please help me name this newest retablo, just finished today. (Think of a retablo as a box containing a story.) What story do you see?
(Click on this second smaller image to increase size of picture. You should then be able to Zoom in and use your scroll bar to see different parts of the image close up. Use + and – to zoom in and out.)
The Dogs Are Barking (May 19,2013)
The Dogs Are Barking
They break the morning––a daily rite.
It’s just a warning. The dogs won’t bite.
Two strangers talk but pass unseen.
I doze, they walk, with a wall between.
I lie here posed between thought and sleep.
My eyes still closed. I’m swimming deep.
I resist the trip––that journey up––
preferring to sip from the dreaming cup
whose liquid darker and bitter thick
reveals a starker bailiwick
than schedules, crafts, menus, schemes.
Much finer draughts we quaff in dreams.
I try to sink back into sleep,
once more to drink of waters deep;
but the dogs still bark. They leap and pace.
My dreams too dark for this morning place.
Those dreams lie deep and intertwined,
wanting to creep back up my mind.
But its slippery slope is much inclined
and provides small hope that I will find
again, that world well out of sight
where truth lies curled, still holding tight––
as oysters cleave and then unfurl
with mighty heave, the priceless pearl
of that other mind that slips the knife
beneath the rind of our daily life.
Time is a brew of present, past
and future, too—whatever’s cast
to stew and steep the story rare
that’s buried deep in dreams laid bare.
Dreams are stories we tell ourselves
that draw our quarries to bookstore shelves.
Pinned to the page, they reach their height
and bring our sage self to the light.
But the dogs are barking. They’re hungry, cross.
When I rise to feed them, the poem is lost.
Uncaught, dismembered, it blows away.
Like petals, scattered in the light of day.
Ghosts
Ghosts
It floated off to the side,
disappearing when I turned to face it head-on.
It hadn’t his features, really,
but I felt his presence a dozen times after—
something floating just off the corner of reality.
Then, weeks later, in the bedroom—a bat.
It flickered against the white curtain and then disappeared.
Moments later, there it was again.
I jerked my head quickly around, flipped the curtain out,
examined its other side.
Moments later, there it was again.
Then a circle floated across to join it.
A hair floated down from above and stuck, center-vision.
A few hours later, the fireworks started—
flashing corollas of light just to the right of me,
like subtle flashbulbs going off.
This was when I decided I needed to see a specialist.
Yes, a retinal detachment, he agreed,
but not yet perforated.
Now, my movements curtailed,
I await that new cloudy ghost
that will be a harbinger
of surgery.
Every tope, every cobblestone
brings a new flash of light—
a signal to still myself.
No jumping. No Zumba.
No jogging. No lifting.
I wait, inactive, watching floaters
move to the center of my vision
and off to the side again.
I practice various levels of exertion,
waiting for the flash that signals rest.
I wait for words to float
across my vision,
to rend my inactivity
and prompt me
to pin them to the page––
to stitch them together
into a clearer sight
of what is there, invisible,
inside me, waiting for the tear
to let it out.
They are the ghosts
of the future
and I am the one
who seeks to gather them,
to mend the tear
and anchor
these slippery ghosts.
As we sat in the waiting room waiting (of course) for my eyes to fully dilate so the dr could do his tests, Gloria asked what the red dot was on my blouse. I hadn’t noticed it, but the nurse said, “Oh we put that on her to show she’d been dilated!” Two hours later, I was still waiting for the dot to turn green so I’d know my eyes had returned to normal!!!!
Red Dot Syndrome
Artist’s rendering of my retinal disfunction.
Gloria, contemplating my fate.
Retina specialist humor.
An undashing pirate wench
My reward!!! Gloria got to share.
Three Pantuns (Day 15 of NaPoWriMo)
Today’s assignment was the pantun, which consists of rhymed quatrains (abab), with 8-12 syllables per line. The first two lines of each quatrain aren’t meant to have a formal, logical link to the second two lines, although the two halves of each quatrain are supposed to have an imaginative or imagistic connection.
Here are three I dashed off quickly in an hour, after a too-busy day. It would be nice if there were room for poetry in every day, unfortunately that is not always so. NaPoWriMo gives us that additional shove to make some time for it, even if that time is very short.
She grows exasperated with his love.
See how his fingertips caress her face?
The hand that fits too tightly in the glove
Might chafe from the embrace of even lace.
The coat tossed idly over kitchen chair.
Inside the pocket is a diamond ring.
The branch outside the window stark and bare.
One tries in vain to pay the birds to sing.
The window that is your connection with the world,
when darkness falls, shows only you.
The author writes, his characters’ truths unfurled,
but it is he the readers view.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 