The Poetry Marathon

A Hundred Years From Now (Hour 4)

Just wondering how they lived, my ancestors

Using capsules to the moon and back

Carrying tablets and pads and phones

Heard they used to dial numbers and wait

Until the other person picked their call

What a life!

 

Saw some of those antiques today-

Ferrari, Lamboghini and Maybach-poor sods

A snail’s speed it must have been.

Hospitals used a thing called laser

Which they called a major breakthrough

 

Just called a friend now by thinking it

Gazillion digits floating in my digital bank

Upgrade and update in milliseconds

And we’re nowhere near where we want to be

 

Wooden Desk in The Woods

It must have happened long ago
when the wooden desk and wooden chair
were taken outside
Perhaps it was an eviction and
after all of the people had left and
the house was no more and
the land and the made things in the land
were forgotten
a sanctuary of memory
grew and grew and grew
and the atoms began to link up
in familiar ways
untroubled by the interlude
known as the age of
the anthropocene and
the world was on its
way to a new balance and
a new phase

Ancestry.com, Hour Four

Ancestry.com

When time trickles away
and my body is lost to it,
one more soul among a trillion others
that float freely in the ether,
what memory hand will snatch me back?

To whom will my words speak?

Will they be pressed between the pages
of a few obscure books
on a dusty backroom bookshelf,
or laid away in the corner trunk
of a great granddaughter’s attic?

Will a wondering descendant a century hence
crack open crumbling pages
and marvel at the quaint turns of phrase,
as flowers from a long gone field?

More likely I will survive
in bytes and bits,
emojis of a distant past
strewn throughout a digital record,
archived, if I’m fortunate, annotated,
my googled past laid bare.

Fourth Prompt – SH (1st hour poem missed/2nd POV)

If it must be, he wished it to go on.

Isolated from the world

So, he could loudly play his song.

On the one tool that allowed him peace

Amongst the trees and breeze easy leaves

The perfect backdrop of which to perform

One he’d play until the keys were gone

With splintered hands he continued to strike

The keys, shattered before his eyes

So he became one with his love and hummed along

Until….

Silence took on his song.

When we had the sun

Son,

Don’t ask me why I’m clad

And the rest are bare.

I have seen two worlds.

Two life times.

I saw the sun.

Humans caressed the sun before it scalded them.

I cover my body with leaves and reeds

Because before me a lifetime away

Men covered their bodies with fabrics.

You do not know what that means, right?

I do not remember what ’twas made of.

A smooth and fluffy body cover,

So cool and soothing, worn by men and women,

And humanity lost everything to technology…

There’s no way to describe it to you.

Just something that transfered the powers of God to man.

They drank much of it and dared God!

Like birds they sailed up to hold meetings in heaven.

Like spirits they sat on the two sides of the great river and held conversations

As though they were in the same room.

Then they began to quarrel,

They began to fight.

They brought down the sun and it burnt everything.

 

 

 

Malaria would not have had her (hour 4)

Without a fridge

The sun was her preservationist

 

Without a bathroom

The family did it in the open

 

Without a microwave oven

Cold meal was a religion

 

Coal-pot cooker was a luxury

Its glow embers kept her cold at bay

But not strong enough to keep the polio away

It snatch her only daughter

 

Had medicine was here

Malaria would not have had her

 

One hundred years ago

 

 

Prompt 2 “He will not see me stopping here”

The end is ugly
Often predictable and heartbreaking
Everything can be done in a different way and still fail
My heart creates space by building a room
Offering him a place to stay for a little while
I need to think about my choices
So I wander
“He will not see me stopping here”
I don’t even know why my mind even cares
I lost many meaningful photographs before
That held sweet reminders of a time before now
I realize the earth will still revolve
Without my interaction
This mind keeps replaying all the times I overtalked
Shared my almosts
Gave him signs that something was wrong within me
Now I’ve returned to this place of reference
That points to more death
Recasting myself
As someone bigger than these feelings

Relationships are not always forever

Hour Four: Greatest of all Time

We’ve never bought a goat,
at least not for us.
We did buy a goat, once,
or maybe twice or thrice,
as part of a holiday
donation, although we
neither met the goat
nor the family for whom
it was bought.

We bought a family of goats
once, three small wooden
mountain goats, lovingly
made by time-worn hands
in a pristine alpine village,
far from our home and
far from the family
for whom we the goat
we never met brings joy.

We need more goats.

We need to be with
the goats.

Self-Guided–Hour 4

Does one walk uphill to get to the beach?

I, dimwitted, did indeed

searching for Red Sand Beach at Hana

Up and up on a wooded cinder cone

through tall grasses looking for an elusive trail

past neglected gravestones with Chinese lettering

made of sea-worn basalt

rounded, standing like fat fingers

on the slope

Eventually one comes to the edge

of the forgotten cemetery

where erosion drops teetering headstones

down to the sea

a shoreline littered with fallen monuments

And there it was

the trail

far below

All I needed was to recall gravity

the force that draws gravestones down

and keeps water from flying

and helps hikers to descend to where

beaches can be found

 

Xyler

We still  remember the day we met

It’s not one to ever forget

It was in winter among the wilting flowers

For us to love you, took barely any hours

 

You gave us memories that will stay with us forever

You initiated a bond that will never sever

Those moments with you were precious and shall be treasured

Our love for you will always go unmeasured

 

It’s been exactly a year since we lost you

The days you weren’t thought about have been few

You will always be missed dearly

You have a special place in our hearts, we mean this sincerely

 

Yes, our time with you was short

Yet you still manage to bring sweetness to every thought

So from down here we send our love

We know it’s strong enough for you to feel from above