The Prodigal Son

“Send me word that he has come back,”

Said the prodigal son’s father.

“Admittedly, he often gets way off track,

Blows off steam easily and hasn’t any tact,

Yet his return is worth the bother.”

 

“Send me word that he has come back,”

Said the much-aggrieved son’s dad.

“He spent his share from what I had.

For he’s not much for filial piety and duty,

Instead, going after fast living and booty.”

 

“Send me word that he has come back,”

Said a most-proper patriarch.

“Any criticism is off the mark.

For P.C. and woke I can’t be.

if I ask for much, he’ll flee..

 

Send me word that he has come back,”

Said the prodigal son’s father.

“He’s back, come Hell or high water.

Kill the fatted calf and make amends

I’d like to see his familiar grin.

 

From a planet “scarcely bigger than a house”

The Little Prince has now returned

From a foreign land’s temptations

To where he once called his home.

“Send me word that he has come back.”

 

The last and first line of this poem is from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince.

 

 

Nature’s Tungue (Last Line in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman)

Prompts Hour Four

Her music and dance will ensure you stay young.

If you plant your heart gladly where all beauty has sprung

So that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

 

Are There Any Questions? – hour 4

Every day,

I ask myself

“Are there any questions?”

way too many to mention

but I will, with intention.

 

Do I look fat?

Should I eat that?

What should I wear?

Does it make me look thinner?

 

Should I sleep early?

Or stay up too late?

Will morning be dreary?

Shall I leave that to fate?

 

What foods should I choose?

Shall I buy me some booze?

Will it make me happy?

Or make me a fatty?

 

And why, oh why

do my feet suddenly dry?

Why does menopause try

my patience?

 

Why lose elasticity?

Why night sweats do I mop?

Why does my stomach pop?

Why do I feel shitty?

When will it ever stop?

 

Why do we hurt?

Do people need to be jerks?

Is life just a farce

with rage, wrecks and cars?

 

Why does traffic bite?

Why have a yellow, bright?

Or red, is it right?

Why blow through this light?

Will they come home tonight?

 

Why, oh why?

Does life have to drive

me crazy?

Why can’t I stay dry

even with an umbrella?

 

– Sandra Johnson, 6/26/21

 

“Are there any questions?”

 Credit: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Prompt 4

I had so many plans for the trip –
castles, burial passageways, concerts,
pubs, live music, the site of the 1916 Easter Rising.

I wanted to walk back in history, see the life
once lived by the grandfather I never knew.

I wanted to see the jail where Grace Gifford married Joseph Plunkett
hours before his death. His crime – standing up to the oppressors.

I wanted to see so many things.
But it was not to be.
The pandemic took over.

Pubs closed, concerts and my flight home canceled.
Dublin became a ghost town.

Stranded in a different country that somehow
felt like home, I was alone yet not alone.

Friends stepped up with offers of money, hospitality,
help finding a new way home.
But part of me wanted to stay.

So, I drank my pints and Irish coffee at the hotel pub.
I took the last tour to Belfast.
I saw Trim Castle and the Bective Abbey
I walked St. Stephens Green and the
streets of Dublin.

I made the most of it.
“All I could do was shrug my shoulders
laugh and say ‘Ah sure, that’s my life
for ya’”
Credit – from Down The Crooked Road by Mary Black

Hour 4 Poem 4 Trust

Trust that I’ve always wanted what’s best for you,

I don’t put much stock into assumptions and stereotypes,

Cheering you every step of the way,

Through the slumps and bumps,

Victories and triumphs,

Bring your friend never was a conundrum,

I’m sure the sentiments are the same,

Though, from time to time,

The loyalty isn’t reciprocated,

I’ve accepted it is what it is,

And accept you as you are as you would expect.

 

 

4 tension lines

I see the strained line,
Icy jagged cliffs
Cutting off mother-in-law
And my husband.
It bursts up in the question
“Where do I put that?”
To the watermelon he just bought.

I block the children
So the flows don’t slice us.

It creates impossible terrain
When he casually leaves a fish
Lying around
With unspoken demand:
Wash it.

They don’t see the eruption.
The cracks and fissures across the floor

I see them.
I feel the tremors.
Before little slights explode.

Everyone hears the screams
“Rubbish”
“Bitch”
“Fuck you”

Slammed doors.
Accusations.

I could see the forest floor
Quake
Slightest provocations.
Before the tigers leap and
Kill.

They don’t see me.
As they lunge,
Clawing
Ripping.

I sit between them
Glued in place,
Glazed.
Unseen
Unthought of.

I yearn to bolt
Like a deer
Escaping predators
To a quiet stream.

They don’t know me.

I am a girl who sees invisible things,
But I am not invisible.

Last line from Tae Keller When you trap a Tiger.

Depression Rejection

I had a talk with my depression today

I told him that I’m tired of the

doubt he makes me feel toward

myself.

I told him that I’m tired

of all the self loathing

and him controlling all

of my emotions.

I told him that I’m done allowing

his influence on me,

I can no longer in good

conscience stand idly by

as he continues to drain

every facet of this life

that is mine.

I told him that

I’m getting up from

this ledge and that

he no longer has

the edge.

I told him that

Today I break away

from all things negative

Today I start again

freshly renewed.

I told him that

Today is the first day

I begin the next chapter

of my existence without

him weighing me down

like an anchor in

my emotional ocean.

we’ve been here

before he and I but this

time it’s different

this time it’s concrete

this time I refuse to

offer my soul as a

sacrifice upon the

altar in which he seeks.

 

Picture Of The World (Half Marathon 5th Hour)

Michellia Wilson
Poetry Marathon Hour 5 (2021)

PICTURE OF THE WORLD

It hangs on a single nail,
openly displayed –
from star to earth,
a large tapestry of all things celestial;

the top in hues of blue,
and speckled with stars twinkling,
in the bend of night;

The middle,
a horizon of sky to meadow,
heavy with wildflowers,
on a windy day;

Merging skillfully to the bottom,
a twist of tunnels,
burrowing to China;

The world,
a mélange of elements,
ordered and perfected,
an image complete in its beauty.

Smoke Reminds my Little Brother of our Old Home

(a poem ending with lines from “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

How I managed the sight of smoke
from my mother’s kitchen and not remember
that I once lived in a home fire burns everything
that has a body, I do not know.
My little brother remembers still that there was
a scar behind his back, something he got
from a blind bullet during the war that claimed
our land and wipe us from the history book.
The smoke on the mountain behind our tabernacle
draws the portrait of his memory on the sky.
Yes, he remembers the fire and the embers of a city.
How do I tell him we’re the fulfilment of what’s written?
That every gathered cloud would rain water through
heaven’s eyes and not fire or bomb or bullet?
I understand there’s still a dent of black
on his rainbowed heart, but every traces
of grief has gone with the old earth.
So we’d beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Melissa and Me

When we left home,
left our preacher fathers
for the parochial school my mother,
also a preacher, had attended,
we knew nothing.

That’s not true. We knew a lot.
We could quote the Bible.
We knew the words and melodies
to dozens of hymns and choruses
and spoke Spanish well enough
to spend a summer on the mission field,
you in Costa Rica,
me in Mexico.
We knew how to read people.

We found each other in the hall
of our first dorm. For all our similarities,
we were different.
I was a scholar.
You were a cheerleader.
I rushed headlong into trouble.
You sauntered into the mess.

What we learned that year
had little to do with algebra, history, or religion.

I learned to avoid the preacher’s sons
and the preachers to be,
the former sent here by their parents,
the later by hopes or a calling.
The local boys, just back from Viet Nam,
were safer and more fun,
despite their bags of weed and white crosses.

The school didn’t appreciate our off-campus education.
The letter I received at the end of semester
asked me to choose another fine Christian institution to attend.

I’m not sure what they determined were our sins?
We went to our classes.
We turned in our homework.
We were in the dorm by curfew.

Maybe it was the questions we asked.
Maybe it was our brashness.
Maybe it was the basketball player I’d started dating.

Her daddy blamed me.
My daddy blamed her,
and kept the letter secret from my mother.

You and I kept in touch.
We married.
Had children.
Married again.
Learned what couldn’t be taught in church.

You never lost your faith.
I gained a new one, in nature, in critical thinking, in love and kindness.

Then the pandemic. My son told me you were sick,
a blood clot. Not a stroke.

I wrote to you, and you called.
After all those years, and it was just like always.

Not Covid, you said,
but you didn’t know what had caused the clot.

Jenny lost her husband to Covid, I said.
My daughter, a widow, the daughter
you helped me raise when I left my first husband.

Two old ladies.
Decades of history, of education, formal and informal.
All those years, some happy, some tragic.

And somehow, we had survived.*

*from The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson