Relationships

Choices

lillian15 Comments

I choose flat dress shoes instead of stiletto heels.
My balance isn’t what it used to be.
I choose a romance novel or best seller.
Headlines raise my blood pressure
and I don’t want to take another pill.
I choose strolling the well-worn path.
Young people can push the boulders up hill.
I choose biting into a blushing velvet peach,
sectioning an orange takes too long.
I choose creating my own sunshine
on a cloudy rainy day.
I choose to be me.
My age, right here, right now,
with you by my side.

Written for Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets where today Sarah asks us to consider anaphora: a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending emphasis. She gives us a list of verbs to choose from for the word we’d like to repeat. I selected the word choose.

Also posted, off prompt, to NAPOWRIMO, Day 5.

Photo from Pixabay.com

Renewal

lillian11 Comments

During the season of cherry blossoms, after more than fifty years of being separated by more than six-thousand miles, we met again. This gentle man, Kenji, who I knew only for one year, all those years ago. So many changes in the world since last we’d seen each other. Kenji was a foreign exchange student from Japan, during our senior year at my Illinois high school. And now I was a visitor in his home country. There for a few days to experience his beautiful culture. In his hometown of Tokyo for one day. How would it be to see him again?

We sat in a small restaurant over a pot of fresh brewed tea. Shared news about our lives, careers and family. Reminisced too. And somehow, the years melted away and friendship bloomed again.

cold brings frost, stunts growth
trees remain rooted in earth –
blossoms come again


Written for Haibun Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Frank asks us to consider cherry blossoms. A haibun combines prose and haiku.
Photo is from our cruise to China, South Korea and Japan in 2019. Such a wonderful reunion with Kenji Kojima! And how appropriate that our friendship bloomed once again exactly during cherry blossom season in Japan.

The Mysteries of Time

lillian1 Comment

Time slips away, disappears.
Those years of youth,
ours and theirs.

I had a firm grasp on reality.
Even so, the mundane simmered,
repetition melded, numbed time.

Infinitesimal changes crept in,
unnoticed until too late.
What was, was gone.

Those everyday moments . . .
in hindsight I know
were anything but mundane.

Sweet viscous memories
fragments, rarely continuous,
slip and slide in my mind.

I sit, smiling gently,
my head in the past
then force myself into the now.

Pen in hand,
I write as time moves on
faster than my script.

My gait slower, skin thinner
eye sight cloudier,
but joy nurtures me.

Each day is still a gift
for one constant reason.
You are still beside me.

Psychotic Break

lillian39 Comments

And so I wandered. Lonely as a cloud, seeking some break in the darkness you left behind. How did I get to this point?

Your proposal caught me off guard. I craved love for so long, my heart could not believe your words. We spent those next weeks in pure bliss. I asked to meet your family. “Soon enough,” you said. Then one day I came home to an empty apartment. Your clothes were gone. Your side of the bathroom, pristine. You’d stood there that morning, shaving off your beard until a fresh unfamiliar face looked out from the mirror. “I’ll have to get used to that,” I said. Did you want me to? They found me, wandering through the house. Incoherent. The darkness was everywhere.

I’ve spent years in this institution now, wondering if you were real.

Written for Prosery Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. EXCEPT, today, we’re not writing poetry. We’re writing PROSERY! This is a form of creative writing, developed at dVerse. The prompter (today it’s me) gives a line or two from a poem of her/his choosing as the prompt. Writers must then write a piece of prose, think flash fiction, that contains the given line(s) word for word, within the body of prose. The punctuation may change….but the word order must be the same and it must be word for word. The prose must not exceed 144 words in length (sans title). As the pub tender/prompter today, I’ve selected the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud” from Wordsworth’s poem I Wander Lonely as a Cloud. The line must be used word for word within the body of prose (punctuation may vary), and the prose must be 144 words or less in length, sans title. Pub opens at 3 PM Boston time. Come join us!

A Carroll for the Ages

lillian17 Comments

With walking sticks in hand
golden agers cross the field
all in the golden afternoon.
The aged aged man smiles,
his love beside him today
and all these many years.

Beach house waits patiently
weathered bench outside.
They stop and look and sigh,
then reach slowly to touch
initials carved so deep that day,
when first they fell in love.

They sit, tremored hand in calloused one,
gaze across the lake.
Vision blurred beyond optician’s help,
still they recognize shapes afar.
A boat beneath the sunny sky
prods his memory back in time,

remembering . . .
. . . remembering . . .
he pats her hand and smiles.

Written for Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Sanaa asks us to consider a Candy Crush Saga! One option we have for our poems is to choose three titles of Lewis Carroll’s poems from a long list she gives us. We do not have to include the titles in our poem, but our poem should be inspired by them and we should give credit to his titles. I was most familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland so this was interesting to see some of the many poems he’s also written! Pub opens at 3 PM Boston time. Come join us!

The Lewis Carroll titles I included word for word within my poem are All in the Golden Afternoon, The Aged Aged Man, and A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky.

First Love

lillian18 Comments

Gardenia laden breeze
flutters lace curtains.
Nightgown clad,
right silk strap slips.
Gentle hands reach slowly
rest lightly on shoulders,
wait patiently.
She sits alert, but melting.
His hazel-flecked eyes ask.
No words. Just asking eyes.
She smiles shyly, nods,
and quietly murmurs yes.

Written for Quadrille Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Bjorn asks us to include the word “eye” or a form of the word, within our poem of exactly 44 words, sans title. Pub opens at 3 PM Boston time. Come join us!

Shinrin-Yoku

lillian18 Comments

Serenity, I walk in bliss.
Trees breeze-whisper, nothing amiss.
Soft ferns hushed, shimmer velvetly.
Moist, fresh forest scent, nature’s kiss.
Your lips come to mind. Ecstasy.
I walk in bliss. Serenity.

Shinrin-Yoku is Japanese for forest bathing: bathing in the forest atmosphere, taking in the forest through our senses.

Grace is hosting Meet-The-Bar Thursday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. She’s asked us to write a Sparrowlet, a poetry form invented by Kathrine Sparrow. Here’s the elements of a Sparrowlet:
1. stanzaic, written in any number of sixtains (6 line stanzas) I wrote 1 sixtain.
2. syllabic: each line must be 8 syllables each (Often written in iambic tetrameter – I didn’t!)
3. Line 1 and Line 6 of the stanza is written in 2 himistichs (I had to look this word up)
4. Rhymed, rhyme scheme is BbabaA.
5. The 2 halves of Line 1 are inverted and repeated as a refrain in Line 6. The lst line MUST be the EXACT SAME as line 1, just switched around. You cannot change any of the words. (Punctuation may be changed to accommodate the meaning.)
RRA, RRB
xxxxxxxxb
xxxxxxxxa
xxxxxxxxb
xxxxxxxxa
RRB, RRA

Luckily Grace included an example of a poem written in this form within her prompt. The example for me, was much easier to follow than the definition itself! Pub opens at 3 PM Boston time. Come join us to try this form — or just to see how others wrote with it!

Photo from a trip to see my niece in Ohio a number of years ago.

Journey Gone Askew

lillian35 Comments

She picked one of the two.
Not her roots in rural life,
golden brick road more tempting.
Drove it to wealth,
fancy home in fancy heights
prestige, black tie events.

Ignored the signs.
Exit ramps,
detours available,
this way outs.
Drove and drove,
hard and harder.

Too late she realized,
the road she picked?
Sadly a dead-end street.

I’m hosting Tuesday Poetics at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets. I’m asking folks to choose one adage/proverb from a list I provide, and use it as their inspiration for their poem today. The list includes adages from Aesop’s Fables, Adagia, Poor Richard’s Almanack, the Bible. I also provide one line from a movie, which is the line this poem is inspired by: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” Forrest Gump, the movie.

Join us at 3 PM Boston time to see the full list. Then write your poem and post it so we can enjoy together! Image from Pixabay.com

Juxtapositioning

lillian20 Comments

Ancient eucalyptus tree.
Pock marked bark-skin,
peeling, barren in places,
adds beauty to greening canyon.

Elderly man in thick glasses,
blue-veined hands hanging limply,
shuffles across street.
Driver sits, hand poised over horn.

Musing, I ponder our value system.
We should learn from nature.

Written for Quadrille Monday at dVerse where the word to use (or a form of the word) in our exactly 144 word poem sans title is “muse.”

Photos taken yesterday from our patio, which opens to a beautiful canyon. We’re in an apartment rental in sunny San Diego until early March, escaping Boston’s winter (as in 11.2 inches of snow on Friday!).