PAD 12 happiest moment

1. Write a poem about your happiest moment. Well, doesn’t have to be yours actually. Just a moment that is someone’s happiest.
2. Write a poem about your saddest moment. Conversely, take happy, flip it, and make it the saddest moment.

The Happiest Moment

Before we got wet

or after we got wet

or as we thought of it - without saying - 

or before we thought of it.

Annecy.

France.

Dinner with friends.  Wine

and what did we speak of 

for hours all of us at the height

of our beauty

and before failures,

fallings away, before devastations

or was that true?

Between them anyway.

Dressed. Lovely. Each loved

and funny.  All well.  All there.

Every morsel shared.  Savoured.

We walked out afterwords over the cobblestones

over the canals to the park.

I remember evening, but it must have been night.

I remember my dress brushing my body

and everything everything perfect.

My laughter, ours, our delight filling the evening

settling on the lake.

Our family whole - or whole enough.

Our friends: family

all of us at the height

of our beauty

Fully dressed, finely dressed

We wanted to run, to run and jump

into the lake, fully dressed, finely

And, in there somewhere,

in the air somewhere perhaps,

was the happiest moment of my life.

PAD 10

For today’s prompt, write a poem incorporating something sweet. Maybe a cake or pie. Possibly a candy bar or pixie stick (you know, that paper straw with delicious sugar inside–mmm). Or move it sweetly in another direction.



It's troubling that you talk to me.
That I hear you.
That I understand and obey.

Chocolate melts at 98.6 degrees.
When it hits the tongue
surrenders, all.

Marriages have been built on less.

Day 9 - the other path

For today’s prompt, take the phrase “The Other (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Some possible titles may include: “The Other Side of the Story,” “The Other Brother,” “The Other Hand,” or whatever else you concoct. And remember: I really don’t care if you bend or break the prompt in your favor. My prompts are just a starting place.

The Other Path

Sometimes the entire course of one's life
depends on

whether you catch that taxi
trip on a sycamore ball
stay sick one day more
wait five minutes
leave too soon
speak your mind, for once,
in public, speaking truth
to power.

If you invite someone to come along
so you are not alone you will linger
with them over Irish Coffee and not see
someone slipped on a sycamore ball,
someone you would have then met
and loved until the universe
ends.

But none of this is interesting.

The life unlived
in a different state
and state of being.

The meals untasted
or the books unread
or the way you would have
scraped the gunk off the plates
had you become a printmaker,
somewhere where it snowed,
where you would have had children
a faith of some kind -
at least a different discipline.

Every moment is the same.
It's a wonder we don't go mad.
I have not yet left the house today.
And that other life that won't now manifest
Dissipates as risen dew
and my mentor in how to live, how to be,
has finished his pancakes,
paid the bill and, just barely,
made the green light.