Tag Archives: your daily word

Short Story

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Short Story

Have you built a final fortress behind the winding wall
so you need not deal with this crazy world at all?
Is your lofty Shangri-la an adequate escape
from the headlines of the day—the raw world’s rub and scrape?
Have you left behind the saga of this noisy world
to hide out in your quiet cave where you are snugly curled
in your Barclay lounger, an old cat on your lap,
your only excitement rubbing against its nap?

How the needles click and clack as you knit and purl,
remembering small triumphs from when you were a girl.
No need for social intercourse or charity or giving.
Each year you knit out a life that contains less living,
striving for an entity devoid of stress and trouble,
sealed up neat and tidy in your private bubble.
This is really living, you tell yourself each day—
loneliness the only price that you have to pay.

 

Prompt words today were lofty, escape, quiet and saga.

Insomniac

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Seventy-two years old, and I still get the same thrill out of staying up late that I did when I was five years old. There is something magical about still being awake when everyone else in the house has been asleep for hours. Things go on in the night that they will never know about. The heavy rain beating on the bulbous skylight of the domed ceiling, the moths fluttering around the chandelier over the patio table, the mystery of cool night air that makes a saga out of what might have been an ordinary night spent in dreams forgotten in the light of day.

The only prompt word ready at this very early hour is saga.

Fatuous Flattery

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jordan-crGG3QXuyPc-unsplash

Fatuous Flattery

I knew him as a rowdy member of our town constabulary,
noted for his bumbling but not lauded for vocabulary.
So when he whispered “pulchritudinous” with raspy voice
though he could have just said, “beautiful,” I wondered at his choice.
He could have called me riveting or gorgeous or just cute.
All those other adjectives I never would refute.
But when a noted doofus picks his words from a thesaurus,
I fear it has no other kinder effect than to jar us.
The fact that he would woo me being nothing but absurd,
nonetheless he might have won me if he’d used a different word!

Words of the day are pulchritudinous, raspy, rowdy and riveting.
photo by Jordan on Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

My Weirdest Post Ever. Sorry.

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Prodigy

He shook his bag of marbles at me in a jocular fashion.
It seems this childhood game is his secret guilty passion.
He had faith that eventually I would slake his thirst,
in spite of my conviction that marbles is the worst
game ever invented, for you see rampant sciatica
coupled with my daily dependence on Sal Hepatica
made my kneeling difficult, uncomfortable, and
rendered it most difficult, afterwards, to stand.

But his most stubborn diligence in begging for a bout
at last contradicted my reluctance and my doubt.
I picked me out a shooter and commenced to knuckle down—
the fact we played for keepsies occasioning my frown.
But it seems I am a prodigy—most artful with my thumb.
It wasn’t very long until he realized how dumb
it was to introduce me to this game that hurt my ribs
bending low to shoot at his dragonflies and mibs.

First I won his cats eye and then I won his aggie.
And when I won his shooter, I fear I became braggie.
In the end, I won at that game that he called ringer
by making a maneuver that proved to be a zinger.
And my friend the marble shark paid for all his sins
as I emptied out his marble sacks and emptied out his bins.
I left with all his marbles rattling in my tin,
grateful that he’d never ask to play the game again!

Prompt words today are marble, shake, jocular and eventual.

Natural Events

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Natural Events

Hear the wind’s soft whistle as it explores the eaves?
What a perfect harmony each new zephyr weaves.
Each mourning wail original, each sad and keening cry
takes my heart on with it as it passes by.

All man’s detailed projects for capturing the wind
only make short use of it. Again, it will ascend
far up above all of us to what created it.
For all our petty problems, the wind cares not a whit.

The sadness we project upon the wind is ours alone,
for the wind has nothing for which it must atone.
In our attempts to harness it, as we make our demands,
we forget we’re part of nature. How have we served as its hands?

 

Where does the wind live? Find out HERE.

The prompt words are wind, whistle, project, original.

Mentor

10 Replies

Mentor

As an old man, he grew his hair long
and wore it unsecured, flowing white over his shoulders,
hiking it back as he walked with one sure toss of the head.
Few except himself would have judged him anything but superior.
His art, original and finely-crafted, showed him as the rogue he was,
yet he pored over art books piled around his chair—
large books rich in imagery and heavy to lift—
a laborious chore to plow through
page by page for anyone except him,
looking for himself in the pages, perhaps,
or looking for part of what he would become.

She thought he thought too much,
looking for answers in books
instead of in himself.
Religion, philosophy, art—
he searched for solutions
in Swedenborg and Picasso.
Compared his poetry to Sarton, Frost and Whitman
while others compared their art, their words to him.

Every piece he completed, he saw himself in as he created it,
but once done, it was as though he’d lost a part of himself in it
and so he started the search again in metal and wood and stone
larger and heavier each time, risking everything
to build himself ever higher.
Seven feet, then twelve, then eighteen feet—
stretching himself to the heaven
that he sought, also, through books.
Searching for what to be.

Wood, stone, metal, clay, glass, paper, words.
None quite solved the puzzle of himself.
Books on the shelf he read again and again
never had all of the answers.
He went as deep into himself as he could go.
Digging for the words he mined
from the parts of himself he most feared,
he often came up empty-handed,
as though he could not bear to see
all of the truth already revealed
in the pure instinctual lines of his sculpture
and those few fine poems he got out of the way of.

A virile man, he worked his angst out
in the shape of children—ten of them
with three different women—going through women
as he went through plasticine or wood or stone,
leaving crumbled remnants to reconstruct themselves
afterwards, as he built poetry out of their mutual pain.
He moved through the world
as most beautiful things do—unaware of his swath.

I rose from his rubble, missing him but remembering
all he taught. The scrape and cut and vibration of a fine machine,
the shaping with hands, the dip of the mold and deckle,
the power of a 20-ton press, the fine hiss of a torch.
Showing me how to get the beauty out of myself,
he formed that confidence within me that he lacked in himself.
Looking in books for what he already had,
looking in the faces of women for love
he never quite believed in,
he never fully realized that it did exist,
even during his worst rages,
right here in the heart
of one who so long afterwards
tries to sculpt his essence
through these words.

 

Bob’s gift to me our first Xmas. He made it..two mouthpieces play two different notes out of the same instrument at the same time. Gongs and a wooden marimba as well.

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

Here is also a write-up and photo shoot that a gallery owner did of our home and studio during the Santa Cruz Open Studio Tours a few years before we closed down our house and studio to I move to Mexico: http://www.wmgallery.com/cruz/brown.html

And here is another blog I did on him and his art: https://judydykstrabrown.com/tag/bobs-sculpture/

Prompt words today were hike, write, original and superior.

Faith, Fame and Family

16 Replies

 

(I think I have a bit more faith than is demonstrated in this poem. What enters us to write through us is more an exploratory being than one completely sure of what we write. I do believe, however, that more evil has been done in this world by those absolutely sure of the rightness of their faith and their beliefs than by those who continue to explore, and the older I get, the more I realize that although part of a larger world and universe, we are all unavoidably alone in our existence.)

The prompt words today are solitary/solitude, alive, ephemeral and inspire.

 

Orgulous of Orgulous!

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Orgulous* of Orgulous!!!

I’m suffering from reluctance and a bit of perturbation
that is interfering with my blog’s administration.
Embarrassed for this rhyme, I’ve no proclivity to flout it.
I’m sure my stats will plummet. There is no doubt about it.

We’ll ascribe the blame to Ragtag, for “orgulous” is the word
they’ve chosen for our prompt today—a choice that is absurd.
Who uses it in common speech, or formal speech, in fact?
Any poem I used it in, I’d afterwards redact.

I’m not a jolly blogger. I’m delaying activation.
I feel no need to add to my reader’s education
by using words requiring their use of dictionaries.
I prefer clear writing that requires no further queries.

It’s habit that demands that I find a way around this.
But now I feel no further need to otherwise expound this.
I’ve flailed around in writing this. I edit and I stumble.
Tomorrow may they choose a word that is a bit more humble!

 

*Orgulous: haughty, proud, ostentatious, disdainful!.

Prompt words for today are stats, jolly, activation and orgulous. (Good grief!)

Summer Courtship

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Our back yard. Lots of places to hide in yards like this up and down the block, as well as in the deep ditches of the school yard across the street.

Summer Courtship

Those summer nights of hide and seek where we were willing quarry,
our efforts to make curfew were too often dilatory.
Our neighborhood adventures stretched out under the stars—
those shadowed venturings abroad, hiding behind cars,
in barrow pits or hedges, darting through the dark,
avoiding passing car lights and the dog’s insistent bark.
Bigger kids the kingpins of this nightly sequestering,
lying still as death with our fears of capture festering.
That titillating strain of remaining undetected,
somehow in our memories has made us more connected.
How we so consistently lay spread out on the ground
cowering, but secretly hoping to be found
by that special someone who, in our pre-teen flush
even then, in passing, could bring about our blush.
All this search and parrying that we called summer games
very soon would fill our lives called by other names.

 

Prompt words today are strain, kingpin, nightly and dilatory.

Night of the Dragon

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photo with permission from Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash

Night of the Dragon

Behold the dragon, how it flows
from its tail up to its nose.
Thirty feet and thirty arms
move the dragon’s sinuous charms—
its razor teeth, its threatening frown—
through the streets of Chinatown.
On its head, a golden crown.
Its many humps move up and down,
forming valleys, growing hills
while moving over rocks and rills.
Straightening out to cross the bridges
spanning between neighboring ridges.
Never flying through the air,
 rising only up the stair.
So many mortals make one beast,
 one night a year to roil and feast
 on errant spirits wandering out
their vile sentiments to flout,
chancing their ends once more to free
 those rotten souls they used to be.
 One night of all we form the back
 that otherwise the dragons lack.
 We form their arms and form their feet,
 arousing awe in all we meet.
 And thus it happens, once a year,
we become that which most we fear.

Prompt words for today are flow, behold and dragon.