The prompt for today was to write a funny poem. It isn’t that I don’t like humor, but somehow I don’t like being told to DO humor. Or I was just in a serious mood.
You’re supposed to find it funny,
supposed to take the joke,
laugh with the crowd as it pokes
at difference and oddity,
as it makes someone else’s pain
its own humor-based commodity.
They didn’t really mean it, see?
Why can’t you take a joke?
Broken bones are one thing,
but words can’t harm you,
like the old rhyme goes.
You’re just too sensitive.
It’s your fault, really,
for being offended,
your problem for taking
a joke at your expense
as somehow offensive.
Gratitude List:
1. Good Old Raisins ‘n’ Peanuts
2. Literature
3. Warm cats
4. Great colleagues
5. Being together on the journey.
May we walk in Beauty!
“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” —Terence McKenna
*****
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde
*****
“Don’t operate out of fear, operate out of hope. Because with hope, everything is possible.” —Winona LaDuke
*****
Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
*****
Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
*****
“Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first or last time.
Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
—Betty Smith
*****
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to breaking of bread.” —James Baldwin
Mockingbird Chronicles 