Tag Archives: your daily word

Diversity

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Diversity

The world’s based on diversity. If we were all the same,
we’d be the cause of our own problems. There’d be no one else to blame.
All of us would be prolific—equal in our fame.
We couldn’t tell our differences merely by our name.

We’d all be the same color and have the selfsame aims,
dance in the same manner and excel at the same games.
When we divulged our secrets, our friends would all be snoring,
for they’d all have the same ones which would make confession boring.

No beauty pageants, chess matches or battles of the bands.
No need to wander off to examine other lands.
If everyone were just the same, there’d be no competition.
Excellence would be extinct and no need for ambition.

There’d be no surprises, no extraordinary gifts.
No ups and downs in life. No depressions and no lifts.
Life would just be humdrum. How boring life would be
if nature hadn’t managed to create diversity!

Image by Jimmy Fermin on Unsplash. Used with permission. Word prompts today are prolific, divulge, count and diversity,When 

A Culinary Manifesto

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A Culinary Manifesto

I cannot overlook your incredible zeal
in polishing off the remains of your meal.
I surmise as you gobble up every comestible
that you are finding it very digestible.

The suspense that I felt as I chopped and sautéd it—
all of that angst that I felt as I made it—
seems unwarranted now, for it is amazing
how contented you seem to have been in your grazing.

You devoured the potatoes and chicken and peas.
You sopped up the gravy and licked all the cheese
from your plate before sucking the grease from your fingers.
And I see that your look of contentment still lingers.

Could that expectant gleam that I see in your eye
be because you have noticed the hot apple pie
that cools on the counter? I hereby assert
I’ll complete your seduction over dessert!

Word prompts today are suspense, surmise, zeal and amazing.

Voting Our Destruction

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Voting Our Destruction

Some birds will still sing and flora abide
no matter what human might reside
in the colorless house with the POTUS inside.
But not so for those that have already died.
In the past year, seven more
have ceased to run or swim or roar.

The outcome of our land and sea,
each animal , insect and tree
depends on policies they make.
Will Earth survive or will we bake
on the spit of reckless choices,
protests made by unheard voices?

Will we find, at end of day
we’ve voted our kids’ lives away?
These are the species lost to us
in last year’s sparring, useless fuss:

                      • Sumatran Rhino. …
                      • Chinese paddlefish. …
                      • Yangtze giant softshell turtle. …
                      • Indian Cheetah. …
                      • Spix Macaw. …
                      • Catarina Pupfish. …
                      • Indochinese tiger

What new denizens will perish
from this Earth we say we cherish?
Yet we vote its life away
And we’re the ones who’ll have to pay.

 

Today the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times than that of the natural extinction rate. WWF reports that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species go extinct every year. Considering the fact that there are around two million species on the planet, it means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. And note, we are talking about species of which humans are one.

As per the 2018 report of World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), there’s a 60% decline in the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians in just 40 years. As per the IUCN Red List, more than 30,000 species are threatened with extinction, which means 27% of the nearly 1,12,000 species accessed so far are under grave danger.

In the past ten years, 33 plant species have become extinct. The species listed above in my poem all vanished in 2019. I was unable to find a list for 2020.

 

Prompt words today are flora, outcome, fated and reside.
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November 3, 2020

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November 3, 2020

We’re all on tenterhooks, watching and waiting.
We’re tired of tirades. We’re tired of debating.
All of our liberties turned inside out.
What was once done in peace has turned into a bout.
They storm and they threaten and set up false boxes—
the eagle of freedom brought down by vile foxes.

We can’t vouch for our system when so much goes wrong—
when our national anthem’s drowned out by a throng
of those who think that because they are white,
they are superior and have the right
to put down minorities and to change facts,
their white supremacy pardoning the acts

of looting and burning and intimidation.
These acts being staged with no trepidation
thanks to the POTUS who sits calmly by
and approves of it all from his perch in the sky.
We anticipate violence—fear it’s the ones
sowing disorder who have all the guns.

What is the solution? To arm everyone
and have a big shootout when voting is done?
Increasingly, I fear our cyber connection
has been both a bane and a lethal infection.
The villains know how to make use of it
to foment disaster and cause a big fit.

It reaches out hands to enter our homes.
It slashes and pierces and rabidly foams.
Hiding its poison in all of the cracks—
in viruses, malicious websites and hacks.
Turn out the villains, then work on the system
that welcomed them in and pampered and kissed ’em.

Our system of governance was made to be changed,
lest it be exploited by the deranged.
Enact campaign finance and firearms control,
then stem the electoral college’s role.
Time-worn practices need doing in,
for the robes of liberty have grown too thin.

Threadbare and tattered, she quakes at the blast
of self-serving politicians that tear at the past.

Prompt words today are tenterhooks, anticipate, storm and vouch. Image by Peggy Zinn on Unsplash. Used with permission.

After the Election

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After the Election

Once the storm’s been pacified, I’ve made a lucid choice.
Never again will I listen to that orange fool’s voice!!!!

Prompt words today are lucid, pacify, storm and choice.

Edible Augury

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Edible Augury

It was a type of augury, our playing with our food,
though Daddy said to stop it and Mom said it was rude.
Surprises in spaghetti, discovered loop by loop—
the future written out in words within our alphabet soup.

Mashed potatoes were our crystal balls. They told us what we’d be
stirring them around our plates to see what we could see.
We flattened peas with tines of forks and piled them in  towers
and when they fell, we saw if they foretold our future powers.

When Grandma saw us doing it, she’d rap us on the fingers
with a colossal soup spoon. The memory still lingers.
And yet I still play with my food—a type of edible rune.
I like it more these days since I’ve outlived the ominous spoon!

Image by Rakhmt Suwndi on Unsplash. Used with permision. Word prompts today are spoon, ominous, augury and surprising.

Light and Dark

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Our Children Follow in Our Footsteps

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

Our children follow in our footsteps

Light and Dark

Darkness is a costume that light dons every night,
drawing ghoulish shadows around her blinding light.
Outlandish to surrender to midnight’s inky stain,
then return as Aurora—shedding her light again.
Why do we seek our opposites? What could the purpose be?
The mountains meet the valleys. Desert gives way to sea.
Every single element and every creature, too—
Christian and agnostic, Arab, Hindu, Jew,
lives with all these contrasts jostling within.
Goodness gives way to evil. Piety battles sin.
Frolicking or feuding, our inner natures jell—
drawing us toward Heaven and/or jerking us toward Hell.
Day by day how can we know how we’ll go down in history?
This alchemy of opposites still remains Nature’s mystery.

Word Prompts today are shadows, outlandish, ghoulish, frolic, light and costume.

Ode to a Spider, Best Spinner of All, and to a Mosquito, Caught in its Thrall

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To the Spider

Insatiable monster, you spin your fine strands,
creating your trap with abdominal glands.
You then cast your nets out into the breeze
that carries them off to the bushes and trees.
With anticipation, you wait in the center
for mosquitos or flies—whatever may enter
your gossamer trap. Then, their prospects are dire,
for one tremor of contact is all you require
to be off in a flash to put them to bed
with  a cocoon of silk wrapped from bottom to head.

To the Mosquito

“I am” says the spider, as she sips out your sap,
“going to have a light lunch, and then take a nap!”

 

The spider pulls the silk created from liquid in its body through its spinnnerets – silk-secreting organs on its abdomen. Once the thread is started, the spider lifts its spinnerets into the breeze. It’s the breeze that is the secret to the spider’s ability to spin a web from one tree to another.

 

Prompt words today are anticipation, insatiable, monster, require, I am and spider.

All in Everything

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Click on photos to enlarge.

All in Everything

My heart as empty as a room the party’s left behind,
I tell myself I am at peace and that I do not mind;
but it may be pertinent, if I am being truthful,
to admit as I say these words, that I am feeling ruthful.

Day-by-day, I improvise, insisting I am free.
‘I” can pursue anything not limited by “we.”
Driving past the railroad tracks, an engine rushing by
reminds me of those trips when I was young and wild and high.

Cheyenne out to Oregon, Sydney to Melbourne town.
Always a new place and new adventure going down.
That local train in Java, stopping a thousand times
at every local village–the hawkers and the mimes 

flooding all the aisles and all the window frames
insistently proficient in their selling games.
All the places where I went teeming with new faces,
constantly observing as life put me through its paces.

Before old age annexed me, I had a brilliant life
as student and explorer, as writer, artist, wife.
Those inevitable things, grave and prompting sorrow
were always covered over by the prospect of tomorrow.

But now that tomorrow is not such a certain thing,
I simply fall in line with whatever life may bring.
Knowing that I can’t flee fate, still I have seized my power
by finding a whole universe in bee and bird and flower.

 

j

 

 

Prompt words today are empty room, pertinent, improvising, annex, railroad tracks and grave.

Back to the Beginning

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Back to the Beginning

When I began my journey, I was jocular and young—
no hardness in my heart and no burrs upon my tongue.
I hadn’t joined the fracas and the chilling of the years.
I had none of life’s baggage—no heartaches and no fears.

Life had not disseminated all her tawdry facts
and I had not encountered them by gossip or by acts.
No tricksters had deceived me. My heart remained intact.
I knew not what I’d missed. I was naïve of what I lacked.

And now that I am older, I’ve returned to what I had
before I had decided I must follow every fad.
The things that I’ve acquired? I am loosening my hold.
I’ve found that satisfaction is not something that is sold.

I have simplified agendas, taking time to see and do
all the things I overlooked while in the human zoo.
The progress of a caterpillar on a hanging vine
as effective as a church in reaching the divine.

The flutter of a wing, the morning calls of birds
reveal as much about the world as news reports or words.
Drawing back into what’s basic and screening the uncouth
has helped me in regaining the lighter heart of youth.

 

Prompt words for today are journey, trick, fracas, disseminate, chilling and  jocular,