Fuzzy Memory

The
prompt 
is
fuzzy



               FUZZY MEMORY
(WHY I WAS NOT A CONTESTANT
                ON JEOPARDY)

   My mind has a million niches for
   odd bits of soteric lore.
   It's not the storage that I lack
   but just means to fish them back!

SPRING

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "seasoned".
SPRING

Spring flutters in, fabulous flirt,
And flicks the last snows from her skirt.
Released from storms' prison,
Our garden hopes risen,
We neighbors are sharing the dirt.

I wrote this this week for Mad Kane's Limerick off.

TIME TRAVELERS

The prompt for for Sunday Scribblings is "It's Out There"

TIME TRAVELERS
We sought this day in many a tale
of rocket trail to alien world.
We bridged the rifts of space to sail
to far star-studded galaxies
with chair-bound ease.

The future beckoned.  Now, instead,
it looms, hard headlined fact.  Our world
grows strange.  We step with grudging tread
into a mapless land and cold.
       Too soon
       Too old.

Ford's Theater

The prompt for Sunday Scribblings is MOMENT



MARY LINCOLN AT FORD'S THEATER

She sat there, loving, petulant, unwise,
by him whose giant shadow through the age
would cast its knobby shape on history's page.
She smoothed her gown, her modish beaded prize
and leaned against him, but demurred aloud,
"What will they think?"  "Why nothing," he replied.
Sad prisoner of herself, her boundaries set
at margins of her days, yet her command
could compass his great heart, whose unreined power
had freed the burdened slave; he brooded yet
over the bleeding rift that cleft his land.
Her plump ringed hand held his a final hour.
                                                   Phyllis Sterling Smith

GHOSTS WALK - A 1913 NEWSREEL

On my old TV sets, ghosta walk.
In pantomime the Kaiser shakes a hand
in double time, with silent talk.
He greets a royal visitor; they stand
in sunshine of a day long past
then, bobbing, jerk across my haunted screen
quick-step, as though to end at last
An infinitely re-enacted scene.

SABBATICAL -- TICKET TO FLY

SABBATICAL - a memory

Predawn gray creeps in the empty room.
Book shelves lie bare, waiting for renters' books;
gone are the family photographs, mementos,
locked away in the crowded basement room.
Our personalities obliterated,
familiar windows, corners grow strange.
Suitcase forms emerge in growing light
next to the travelling clothes hung on a chair.
Even the mattress lacks its sheets and spread;
we sleep like displaced persons, refugees,
ready to roll our sleeping bags and go.
 Only a scent remains (our aura?) to hint
that we use garlic, lavender and wax.

And am I sad to leave?  No, I am ready,
my mind outdistancing the throbbing plane,
my skin anticipating balmy air,
my nose - dark coffee, pungent herbs, ripe fruits.

Last night I dreamed in Portuguese. 

My husband, Dr. Otto. J. M. Smith was professor at 
U. C. Berkeley, and our sabbatical leaves took us to
many countries, but Brazil was one that we returned to
again and again, and whose language I had studied
and knew well.  

FERRIS WHEEL

                 FERRIS WHEEL

On the rim of the golden coin we spun
fiefly lit for our soaring flight.
For a frozen tick of time we hung
at the crest of the turning disk of light,
upturned faces lost below,
above us space and stars and night

By day we see that cables snake
through trampled grass to girdered wheel,
its motor black with furry grease,
its garish paint begun to peel
Popsicle wrappers and popcorn bags
blow fitfully through bolted steel.

We should see truth by sunlight. Still
     the night
     and space
     and stars
          were real.