Tag: poetry

A Pretty Darn Good Life

lindastudley2 Comments

Find some land and some wood, build a house.
Use your heart and your brain, find a spouse.
Work when it’s light,
Sleep when it’s night,
When the weather is bad don’t go out.

Find a spade and some seeds, plant a garden.
Add a cow and some hens to the yard and
grow them some food,
they’ll do the same for you.
Get a sensible dog who will guard them.

Find the deadfalls and snags, cut wood
that will fit in your stove and burn good.
dowse a well for your water.
Raise sons and daughters.
build a cellar to hold all your food

There are other things that would be nice,
like a black and white cat to catch mice,
songs you can hum,
guitars to strum,
and books you would read more than twice.

That’s a pretty darn good life.

 

#101

How to Twist Wire

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Now take the wire in your left hand, the pliers in your right
and make a ninety degree bend not quite halfway along
rather like that bend in the road that I took
when I met your father.

Now, put down the regular pliers and pick up
the round nosed ones and twist a loop into the wire,
somewhat like the loop your arrival twisted
into our lives, perfect, symetrical,
the first full twist on a DNA strand.

Now grasp that loop with the regular pliers, hold firm,
sort of like we did when you rebelled, although you were
a decidedly reasonable child.

Now take a few wraps
around the wire, tight and close,
much like the way we’ve always been.

Now snip off the left over wire, the part left over
that needs to find another purpose, another role,
a bit like your journey into independence.

Now string your gems and pearls.

Repeat.

 

#99

My Mistake

lindastudley2 Comments

I don’t dwell on my mistakes but they do live quite close by
and we get together often though we don’t see eye to eye.
And I tell them how they should be and they laugh at me and claim
I should go look in the mirror if I want someone to blame.

And they always come to visit at an inconvenient time
my pennance and my poison and my sentence for my crime
of trying something different and stumbling and falling
of trying to discover my vocation, my true calling.

And I’ve tried to move away but they follow me. I guess
they have a built in radar for a forwarding address.
I suppose I’ll have to learn to get along with them some day
They’re my oldest, closest friends and they just won’t go away.

 

#98

Nickel for Your Thoughts?

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Budget day has come and gone, the news has turned to olds
but for one staunch Canadian it knelled a cruel death toll.

For many years he suffered from a deficiency of copper.
He alternately was the friend and bane of every shopper,

who, after lugging pounds (or kilos) of them in their pants
empty them on dressers or into piggy banks,

then find that when the register rings something fifty nine
their purse and pockets are bereft, no pennies can they find.

Devout friend to small children living close to railroad tracks,
we passed him off a million times but he always came right back.

Today we bid a fond farewell to our pseudo-copper friend.
The brave Canadian penny has met a cents-less end.

#97

The Single Original Thought

lindastudley2 Comments

They say “pride goes before a fall”
I say “I don’t agree.
Pride is what makes us excel,
our downfall’s vanity.”

They say “the truth will set you free”
I say “I must demure.
Whose truth are you speaking of?
I assume it must be yours.”

Clouds have silver linings and
it’s darkest before dawn
and early birds all get their worms
and ugly ducks are swans.

We’ve thrown up clichéd fences
of homily and adage
with lies for all occasions
to carry ‘round like baggage.

There are many memorable mottos
that would better be forgot.
For there are no glib pronouncements
worth a single original thought.

 

#96

We Take Our Place in the World

lindastudley5 Comments

We take our place in the world and carry on
for even being nothing has its place
like silences that punctuate a song.

All things, and their lack, live where they  belong.
Positive pictures have negative space.
We take our place in the world and carry on.

I once believed that only strength was strong
till petals lit upon my upturned face
like silences that punctuate a song

The fragance haunts my memory all night long
although the fragile bodies left no trace.
We take our place in the world and carry on.

I used to think that things were really gone
just because they’d left an empty space
like silences that punctuate a song.

Our lives are like a pencil sketch we’ve drawn
Our shadows linger on like lines erased.
We take our place in the world and carry on
like silences that punctuate a song.

# 95

Challenge accepted Tony! Here’s the villanelle!

Geography Lesson

lindastudleyLeave a comment

Still waters may run deep
with rippling refractment.
Still waters may run deep
But often become stagnant.

No man is an island
all aloof and insular.
No man is an island
but some men are peninsular.

Faith may move a mountain,
shift it stone by stone.
Faith may move a mountain
but trust leaves it alone.

#94

Awakening

lindastudley4 Comments

Some days I think I understand what it must be like
to wake up from a coma,
groping for the past, staring into the mirror
only to see a stranger staring back.

Some days I think I understand what it must be like
to live in a foreign country,
everyone waving hands and talking gibberish
until I speak, and they stare at me, puzzled.

Some days I think I understand what it must be like
to be a sleepwalker,
restless pacer, blind seeker,
doomed to endlessly retrace a pointless journey.

Then your laughter rushes in to fill the gaps,
you smile in a language we both understand, and
the beating of your heart sings me to sleep.

#92

Fibonacci Rules

lindastudley6 Comments

I?
I
do
not
think
that form
poetry is a less
valid expression of true
emotion or insight than vers libre poems,
do you? There is a symmetry
to it. Fibonacci
makes our
poems
fit
to
a
t

#89

Fibonacci – the sum of the number of letters in the last two lines equals the number of letters in the next line (I also reversed this). So start with 0 and 1, 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5 etc….(1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21…)