While we
are busy building,

While we
are busy boating,

While we
are busy busying
ourselves,

The world is busy being,
breaking apart, coming together,

Every day a reformation
of the last.

This poem was written in response to Margo Roby’s image prompt of 12/15/15.

 

 

I can’t vote.
I’m not permitted to
work outside my home
(or inside, for that matter.)
But I can read! I can
make up my own mind.
And I can still speak,
maybe even advocate
in my quiet “ladylike”
way. Clever observations
over strident opinions from
a spectacled subversive.
 
 

This poem was written in response to Margo Roby’s 12/1 image prompt a painting of a French woman reading Le Figaro. In doing a bit of research for this poem, I found out that France did not extend suffrage to women until 1944!

My wish is to spend Christmas
in New Orleans once again,
the reveillon, the Christmas feasts,
oysters, mud bugs, gumbo, beignets,
sweet music in the streets,
in all the day and night.

New Orleans’ wish for Christmas?
The undertone of loss
in reveillon and Christmas feasts,
missing the music in the streets.
Who is gone? What is left? Who
does she wish to see tonight?

This poem was written for Miz Quickly’s Day Twenty-Nine Challenge to write two parallel poems about wishes, one concrete and one abstract.

 

Boxes where I keep the tattered
scraps of journals and notebooks,
traces of the struggle all but gone
as I consider what’s been said.
“Do you hear yourself?” I ask
in my darker moments when
I’m standing on the other side.
“Do you ever hear yourself?” I ask
again, as those notebooks and journals
reply in unison, “You are not

finished. Be still and listen.”
 
 

This was written for Miz Quickly’s Day Thirty Challenge in which she gave us a series of phrases to use as we were inspired.