Christ’s Entry

I can’t really say I loved him. Love does not come easy for me. He was my first kiss, a little bit of making out, kind words from his thin lips.

I went on to guard the pool, to save a life, my tanned olive skin a beacon for men. Then one day a man walked through the gate and I watched his choppy strokes across the water and married him.

We vowed to love art. To make art out of our lives. We traveled both locally and abroad but that huge painting on the Getty wall stays with me— Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 by James Ensor.

When will He come?

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NaPoWriMo Day 21 prompt— a person forgotten, a job taken, a memorable piece of art, an unanswerable question

https://smarthistory.org/ensor-christs-entry/

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Momento

When I got too haughty, my mother would say, “Who do you think you are? A Floradora girl?” I hardly knew the meaning of a Floradora girl but it was the tone of which she spoke it that made me pause my behavior. I knew she had a doll named Floradora. I didn’t know Floradora girls were also beautiful women who danced in a chorus line in the musical of the same name. Perhaps her mother had said the same to her when she displayed an air of arrogance.

Ash Grove

My great grandfather

built his home in Southern Iowa

out back was a grove of ash trees

the people called the town Ash Grove

now gone from the map

forgotten place

I can still see the changing color

of leaves falling to the ground

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dVerse quadrille prompt on the word ash

Family Name

I followed my family name

to Yorkshire cemetery

where those old family headstones

held the dates of birth and death

those old Anglo Saxon names

etched upright in native stone

surrounded old Roman church

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bell tolled to gather us in

stone baptismal at the door

I drank from silver chalice

the vicar offered me

in the rite of communion

aware of ancestral lips

that had taken worship there

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I search Proctor family name

Old English word proketour

occupational surname

for those who worked as steward

from the Latin procurare

to manage spiritu cors

keeper of the key— that’s me

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NaPoWriMo prompt to delve into your name

Mumbly Peg

I never cared much for whiskey

beer okay when its cold

drinking myself into a stupor

not high on my list of does

but yesterday I wanted a hunting knife

a short fixed blade with a sheath

I think of how I was taught

a game called mumbly peg

so holding the wooden handle

tossing the knife in the air

I watched it fall to the ground

and thought of my father’s despair

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A first time for me prompting to Poets and Storytellers United based on a game my father taught me

The Family Portrait

 

The old frame that holds the family portrait is removed,

separating it from this photograph of another time, another place.

The place is Red Rocks National Park in Colorado.    The family sits

blended into rock landscape for that single instance of togetherness

that we can never repeat.  I search for a smile, or a half frown on any

of the faces.  I,  a new mother,  in full smile, hold my first born Anna

with my hand held firmly over her heart.  Two blonde sisters’ dimpled

smiles are framed by a huge red boulder.  The men are outnumbered.

My father,  last to bare his name,  is big and on the edge,  like in life.

His mother stands close to him and between dad and mom, symbolic

of many a rocky marriage.       All three, mother  father  grandmother,

are dressed in beige and seem to fade into the earth’s bright colors.

Now they are gone.  The husbands are bearded and beautiful.

The children sit, knowing and vague.

 

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Family portrait taken in the winter of 1980, poem written in 1989 and

revised for the NaPoWriMo prompt of 2016.