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Our Road

lillian29 Comments

Our road, rain slicked by spring storms,
slippery driving through rivulets.
Garden store trips for flower flats
bring beautiful garden blooms.

Summer haze simmers above its asphalt.
Seashore drives with our kids
from toddler through teenage years.
Back seat songsters to quiet texters.

Our road, dressed in autumn’s finest.
Bright yellows to burnt oranges,
like bouncing shimmering can-can skirts.
Costume changes in passing seasons.

Difficult on many winter days,
snow covered, sometimes impassable.
Homebound, cocooned by drifts,
content to savor relaxing by the fire.

Our road,
our passage to and from.
Just the two of us. Then three, then four.
Now as two again.

The straightaways
always faster than any other part,
made distance and time fly by.
Used to be our favorite parts.

Our road, these days?
We prefer the meandering parts.
The curves and bends that slow us down,
taking longer to reach the end of the road.

It’s Open Link Night at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today, Sanaa asks us to post any poem of our choosing, or an ekphrastic poem related to the image she provided above.

NOTE: Sanaa will also host dVerse LIVE on Saturday, from 10 to 11 AM New York time. Look HERE for an embedded link that will take you with audio and video to a LIVE meeting where folks from around the globe will read a poem of their choosing aloud to the group – OR just drop in to watch and listen. The more the merrier!

Be my Lou for the day . . .

lillian22 Comments

. . . remember that old song?
Of course you do. Sing it with me!
Skip to my Lou, my darlin’!

Let’s skip stones across a pond
and then, chalk in hand,
draw hopscotch on a sidewalk.
Later you can pour me a Scotch
and we’ll pour over old photo albums
laughing at our childhood antics.

A bit puckered out and perhaps tipsy too,
we’ll gawk at the stars, sitting on the stoop.
Stooped shoulders with a myriad of wrinkles.
Madeline L’Engle’s wrinkles in time
singing Skip to my Lou, my darlin’!
Oh let’s just skip the malarkey and admit it.

We’re septuagenarians in love with life!


Melissa has us zeugmatically speaking for today’s Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. She explains, “zeugma is defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses.’ Zeugma is a rhetorical device that is used to emphasize, add humor, or surprise a reader.” Hopefully, I’ve done this correctly with the words skip and pour. The words Scotch, stoop, and wrinkle are played with a bit here as well. Madeline L’Engle’s famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time, is also referenced . . . sort of!

Love Dances On

lillian29 Comments

Victrola plays Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade.
She sits dozing, blue-veined hands quiet,
elbows on doily-covered armrests.
Asleep, she was dancing with him.
Awakening to reality
she stares at his empty chair.
Only a figment in her dreams now,
she still misses him every day.

A quadrille written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. I’m hosting today, asking folks to include the word “figment” (or a form of the word) in their poem of exactly 44 words, sans title. Image created in Bing Create.

Detour

lillian22 Comments

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Heraclitus

Some years back we found ourselves near the town I grew up in – Waukegan, Illinois. I’d not been there in decades. We decided to take a detour in our planned trip and drive by some of my old haunts.

Sadly, the house I lived in for my first nine years was in a state of disrepair. Rickety porch steps, missing shingles. My mother’s beloved lilac bushes were no more. The downtown where I’d “scooped the loop” in the front seat of an old Chevy was barely recognizable. Not one store name was the same. Most jarring was my walk through the Catholic church I grew up in. How could it be so small? I remembered lighting candles inside a hushed space – a side grotto/cavern made of dark rock. There I stood, inside the grotto, looking at battery operated candles and grey plastic simulated stone walls. After lighting a candle and saying a small prayer for my mother, I decided to end our nostalgic tour. I wanted to keep the rest of my memories intact.

stream rushes surely
rocks tumble and change their shape
nothing stays as is


Frank is hosting Haibun Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. His prompt for today is to “imbue our haibun with mono no aware. Write on any topic that you like as long as your haibun embodies that wistful sadness marking the beauty of transience.” A haibun combines prose and a haiku. Image is a photo I took some years back on one of our vacations.

How ’bout them apples!

lillian12 Comments

Past their prime,
over ripe apples hang in the balance.
Juice oozes, fruit drops to the ground
breaks open and fleshy mush spills.
Bright sunshine illuminates spoilage
as ants and maggots hover.
I found a box, cleaned it out, and filled it anew.

Past their prime
professors snore in ivory towers,
deliver lectures heard years before.
A ninety-year old senator stumbles,
scheduled to serve until 2029.
Justices can wear gowns until they die
unlike ballerinas who ditch their tutus
when the musculature gives out.
I found a box, cleaned it out, and filled it anew.

So here’s some words to consider then.
Timely picking does make good pies.
No matter the paper put round the fish,
they do eventually put up a stench.
The crowd generally cheers louder
when you leave the court  at the top of your game.
I found a box, cleaned it out, and filled it anew.


Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe.

Today we’re introduced to Bop Poetry created by Aafa Michael Weaver and asked to write a poem that follows the form below:
Create a 23 line poem, in 3 stanzas. The stanzas must be ordered in this fashion:
1. a 6 line stanza that poses a problem
2. an 8 line stanza that expands the problem
3. a 6 line stanza that solves the problem
AND, here is the tricky part,
each of the stanzas must have one additional line that is the refrain (repeated) and it must be either
“I found a box and put a room in it” OR we can add our own ending to “I found a box . . .”

FYI: Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa is 90 years old and his term in the Senate does not expire until 2029. And, lest you think I am complaining about the age of President Biden: here in the U.S. we are faced with a choice between two men for President. One is 77 and the other is 81. So yes, I do wish there was new blood on both sides. However, these are the two men and one will become our next president. The difference between the two men could not be more stark. I fear for this country, for women, for my grandchildren, for the environment, for immigrants, for universities and schools if Donald Trump becomes president again.

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

Incandescent

lillian11 Comments

Quick-minded youth leap to decisions,
days assumed to blaze in glory.
Bright eyes focus on the glossy
blind to consequential reality.

Those with blue veined maps on their hands
contemplate the world as a Pensieve.
Luminescent vapors
teem with incandescent memories,
decisions weighed accordingly.

Written for dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe where today Mish asks us to create a quadrille (poem of exactly 44 words sans title) that includes the word blaze.

Also written for NaPoWriMo Day 29 where the prompt is explained in this way: “If you’ve been paying attention to pop-music news over the past couple of weeks, you may know that Taylor Swift has released a new double album titled “The Tortured Poets Department.” In recognition of this occasion, Merriam-Webster put together a list of ten words from Taylor Swift songs. We hope you don’t find this too torturous yourself, but we’d like to challenge you to select one these words, and write a poem that uses the word as its title.” One of the words in the list is incandescent.

Time: the Conundrum

lillian1 Comment

The future is beginning now.
When I arrive,
I am what was missing before.

Tomorrow always becomes
a yesterday. My past
was once unknown to me.

Time is after all, a glutton.
Best to concentrate on the moment,
every time it comes.

Written for NaPoWriMo day 24.

The prompt is to “write a poem that begins with a line from another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it.” “The future is beginning now” is from Mark Strand’s poem, The Babies, published in his Collected Poems published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. He is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Image is from Pixabay.com

Lillian as Lily?

lillian9 Comments

Living my life as a perennial?
Lily of the valley, that would be me.
Closest to forever
I ever would be.

Lily of the valley, that would be me,
planted beneath our family tree.
I ever would be
blooming and seeing generations to come.

Planted beneath our family tree.
Closest to forever,
blooming and seeing generations to come,
living my life as a perennial.


Written to fulfill the prompts for for day 18 of NaPoWriMo and for Meet the Bar Thursday at dVerse the virtual pub for poets around the globe.

Prompt for NaPoWriMo today is to write a poem where “the speaker expresses the desire to be someone or something else and explains why.”

Prompt for dVerse today is to write a Pantoum: a poem of any length written in quatrains and using the prescribed line directions below:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4

Line 5 (repeat of line 2)
Line 6
Line 7 (repeat of line 4)
Line 8

Last stanza:
Line 2 of previous stanza
Line 3 of first stanza
Line 4 of previous stanza
Line 1 of first stanza

Time in a Bottle

lillian3 Comments

When I was very young
time meant having fun.
The road ahead of me . . .
well I couldn’t see the end
much less fathom the turns,
detours, or optional routes
in the long journey to come.

A septuagenarian now,
closer to eighty than seventy,
my memories are glued in scrapbooks.
From early marriage days
to birthdays and holidays,
newspaper clippings,
and recital programs.

Wedding albums,
birth announcements.
Photo albums filled with
tent-camping vacations,
early grandparenting days,
family reunions,
scenery shots from cruising days.

There is no doubt about it, time is a glutton.
It eats up seconds, months,
and precious years. But if we could stop it,
collect special events,
and put them in a bottle,
the question is,
at what point would we do that?

What would be the ripple effect?
Which moments might be lost,
what aspects of human development
might be missed in that stutter moment
between stopping the clock and starting it again?
Can we really judge what is significant enough
to stop everyone’s else’s world to save our own?

And just as important to consider,
how many bottles would we need?


Written for NaPoWriMo day 17 where the prompt today is to choose a song, and write a poem whose title is the name of the song. Time in a Bottle was made popular by Jim Croce.