Tag Archives: your daily word

More Advice Regarding the Coronavirus

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More Advice Regarding the Coronavirus

With the coronavirus, it’s been given to debate
whether it’s advisable for people to conflate.
Though Pence may okay shaking hands, doctors disagree.
I’d listen to the experts if it were up to me!

Cheek-kisses were delightful in eras non-pandemic,
but lately people fear that they might start an epidemic.
So we’d better kick the habit and make do with a tweet—
just clicking our affection to everyone we meet.

Let safety be our anchor as we all isolate—
our crowded barrooms giving way to the cyber date.
Bitcoins replacing money, for it doesn’t carry germs.
Wearing masks and hazmat suits as we come to terms

with what our esteemed president once tried to pass off
as no major problem—a mere temperature and cough.
Tweeting like a dervish, he still gets such a kick
spreading disinformation as more and more get sick.

But I have a solution for one thing that we could do
to try to stem the factors spreading this dreadful flu—
a mandatory gag and a mandatory mask
for POTUS and Vice-POTUS is what we all should ask.

Prompts for today are delightful, conflate, kick, anchor and money.

Lazy Feet

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Lazy Feet

Crossing the room or traversing the plain,
one foot goes in front of the other again.
It is the business of shoe after shoe
to follow each other through sand, dirt or goo.

They have easy going through fields filled with clover,
but when they meet something they have to climb over,
their task is much harder. No reflecting or browsing,
for climbing up hills is ten times more rousing.

They  pump up the blood, these mountains and ramps.
They irritate arches and instigate cramps.
They cause blisters, pulled muscles, and wear a girl out.
That’s why I don’t often saunter about.

You won’t often find me walking out there
with the wind to my back and stirring my hair.
For although there’s less scenery, I do not care.
I prefer bed or hammock or chair.

Prompt words today are something, browse, revenge, traverse and business.

Camouflage

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Please click on the title above so WP will reformat the poem into its intended shape. For some reason The Reader always left margin justifies and this poem needs to be centered.  

Camouflage

A man is bending his wife—
melding their shadows with the green forest.
They do not listen
to the nearby cannon’s roar––
will not imagine
that their life together,
so new,
might
not
stretch
into
the
future.

When he looks at his pocket watch,
someday children
ringing a well-stocked table
vanish in
her imagination.

He lifts his musket to his shoulder,
trying to believe
in a future
and in it,
this memory:
two shadows
joined as one,
invisible against
the forest wall.

Prompt words today are green, bend, shadow, cannon and memories.

Daily Alarm

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Daily Alarm

The knock outside my window is loud and most insistent—
High up in the palm tree, repeated and persistent.
It’s my daily woodpecker, knocking me awake,
way up on my mountain, far above the lake.

He comes before the sunshine kisses the same tree,
trying to be helpful by stirring lazy me.
This Braille invitation, his daily expression
told with bouncing beak tapping out a impression

in the palm tree’s trunk so high above the crew
far below the palm fronds who greet the day anew
by scraping algae from the pool or making up the bed
as another down below sorts words out in her head.

 

(Enlarge photos by clicking on them.)

Prompt words today are sunshine, bounce, helpful, crew and expression.

Cat Meditation

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(Click on first photo and then on arrows to enlarge photos.)

Cat Meditation

Entwined in my jacket, spread out on my quilt,
my cats take up the space they frequent with so little guilt.
I wonder what they visualize in their cache of dreams?
Is their sleep as peaceful as it always seems?

The dogs may twitch and bark and reach out paws in times of rest,
but cat sleep is so tranquil. They “do” their sleep the best.
They need no permission to tuck their chores away
and wander inward to their dreams, be it night or day.

Oh that I could rest away from all the world’s mad clatter. 
The dreams they dream upon your lap are helpful in the latter—
their purr the loveliest mantra to help your mind unfurl
as you become their mattress, pinned beneath their curl.

Words for the day are purr, visualize, helpful, cache and jacket.

Family Feud

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Family Feud

A skin of wine, flagon of malt
were meant to alter the gestalt
of a relationship gone wrong
and left to fester for too long.

It was meant to be a gift
left at a door to seal a rift—
a treasure left there in the dust
to heal a wound and restore trust.

But battles don’t so easily end.
A sincere gift may just offend.
Too much whiskey, too much wine
do not prompt reason when they combine.

They render one less than astute.
No offering of peace will suit
one determined to find fault
and so the feuding did not halt.

 

Prompt words today are trust, combine, gift, battle and suit.
image by Peter Forster on Unsplash, used with permission

Practice Makes Perfect

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Practice Makes Perfect

His patience in predicament has become legendary—
a necessary attribute in one so prone to marry.
He tolerated petulance in the child bride
married out of loneliness after his first wife died.
He tried to build her confidence, but finally set her free,
realizing what she needed most was liberty.
His third wife used another means to put him to the test,
running up his credit cards while feathering his nest.
His fourth wife played around, and the kin of number five
turned his peaceful home into a frantic humming hive.
Only in his dotage did he finally meet his prize—
not as stunning in her beauty, but lovely in his eyes.
No grand faults to overlook. No predicaments to fix.
No petulance to deal with. No relatives to nix.
Marriage done at any age can be pleasure or blight,
but  when he married in his eighties, he finally got it right!!

 

Prompts for today are tolerate, predicament, nest, legendary and confidence. Photos by JD Mason on Unsplash, used with permission.

The Great Unquoted

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The Great Unquoted

Folks from the country are rarely surveyed.
They’re too far from the action so rarely waylaid
by people with surveys or long questionnaires
who don’t know the difference between bulls and mares.

They’re afraid of  rogue bulls (or perhaps they are steers?)
Then wood ticks and snakes are additional fears.
So they’re given to mutiny when asked to go
to where they consider the folks are so slow

that they’re dumb as the fence posts  that border the road.
They aren’t up on the lingo. Their clothes aren’t in mode,
but farm folks are happy no matter what season.
If they’d taken a survey, they’d find the top reason

is that folks armed with clip boards don’t haunt every nook.
They don’t stand at the corner or invade your brook
when a fellow stands fishing and thinking great thoughts.
They don’t snoop in your garbage or peek in your pots.

Here in the country, while working or drinking, 
we keep to ourselves all the thoughts we are thinking.
Let city folks keep all their lists, charts and numbers.
We county folk prefer our bucolic slumbers.

Prompt words today are afraid, top, country, mutiny and post. And for dVerse Poets Open Link.

He might look like a city boy, but that’s my dad stretched out under a tree down by the river, thinking great thoughts. I think my mom had him dressed up for a church picnic.

Mystery Bride

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Mystery Bride

As ceremonies go, theirs was most whimsical in nature—
as original in rite as in its nomenclature,
for to the credit of the groom, who set custom aside,
it was he who chose to take the last name of the bride.

Right off, it captured interest the day the knot was tied
when his wife-to-be was clothed with little left to hide.
Swathed in camouflage from her head top to her toes,
you couldn’t see the bride at all. You only saw her clothes.

So since no one had met the bride, when  their “I do’s” were said
without the bridal burqa being lifted from her head,
nobody really knew at all what his Mrs. looked like.
The groom was heard to say it only mattered what she cooked like.

And so the mystery of the bride remains up to this day.
If his family’s seen her, not one of them will say.
And though his treatment of his bride is thought by some as vicious,
all agreed the wedding cake she baked was most delicious.

Prompts today are cinch, ceremony, whimsical, capture and interest.
Photo by Omar Belattar on Unsplash, used with permission.

Advice to Dorothy as She Elopes with the Tin Man

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Advice to Dorothy as She Elopes with the Tin Man

I can’t fathom your limerence. Why would you settle
for an older lover who’s made out of metal?
It’s good to be flexible, but don’t you think
that this is a rather impossible link?
Your honeymoon’s bound to be rather a bust.
If you go to the beach, he is likely to rust,
or if you go skiing, his joints will freeze rigid.
It’s hard to make love to a tin man who’s frigid!
You’re young and you’re limber. Your life’s at its start.
Why pick a lover who hasn’t a heart?
Please take my advice when it comes to men:
no lions, no scarecrows, no men made of tin.

 

Prompt words for today are flexible, gambit, limerence, fathom and metal.