Open Link

The End

Goodbye to "What's Going On?"

Thank you for accompanying us,

and especially for posting a poem today,

on our last day. We are retiring the blog site.  It's been quite a journey for the 4 of us and all of you together.  

And now, keep on writing! 

Today is an open link, so post what you'd like from your stash of self-made favorites.  You can post a new poem, too.

This last week I thought I'd show pics of animal friends I've lived with over the years. I love the view (above) of Sabrina and Mariah together sleeping in the sun, and (below) Miracle and Pierette in a rare and peaceful moment together.  Both sets of cats have crossed the rainbow bridge, though I still feel their spirits with me.

Again, today is an open link, so post what you'd like from your stash of self-made favorites.  You can post a new poem, too.

Continuing my cat theme (and my custom of including an inspiring poem or two), here's one from Marge Piercy:

The cat’s song

By Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,

says the cat, although I am more equal than you.

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings

walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

💛💛💛

The End

Goodbye to

"What's Going On?"

Thank you for accompanying us,

and especially for posting a poem today!

💛💛💛

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.

Let Tove Ditlevsen Inspire You!

(Just a Heads Up for All Poets:  What's Going On? is going to close down. We will have our last prompt next week, and it will be an Open Link, so you can plan ahead.  Now enjoy this week's prompt!)

Let Tove Ditlevsen Inspire You!

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) is one of the most loved and (also) literarily scorned writers in Danish literary history. She was a poet, novelist, and memoirist whose brutally honest writing about girlhood, motherhood, addiction, and mental illness has intrigued generations of readers—especially women who see themselves in her quiet, contained desperation.

She was born into a working-class family in Copenhagen and published her first poem at age 13, setting off a lifelong tension between literary ambition and emotional survival.

Ditlevsen wrote from the center of her own pain. Her most acclaimed works—the Copenhagen Trilogy (Childhood, Youth, Dependency)—are memoirs written with clarity and startling emotional depth. In them, she describes a world where women are expected to endure silently: husbands, children, poverty, institutionalization, pills. Her voice is controlled, almost clinical—making the truths beneath it even more devastating.

Despite early success, Ditlevsen’s life was marked by addiction, psychiatric hospitalizations, and four marriages. She wrote openly about her dependency on prescription drugs and the damage of being both a woman and an artist in mid-century Denmark. She once wrote, “People always expect you to be more ashamed than you are.” That defiance, mixed with exhaustion, runs through all her work.

She died by suicide in 1976. For years, her work was underrecognized internationally, but recent translations—particularly of the Copenhagen Trilogy—have sparked a major revival. It wasn't until recent years that her brilliance has been acknowledged.

So why am I telling you about Tove Ditlevsen? When I was in the Copenhagen library (which also had a bookstore) I discovered a poetry book in English by her: There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die. The title intrigued me, so I skimmed through the book. I decided to buy it. (The first poetry book I bought in years.) I find her writing refreshingly honesr and real. I wanted to share a bit of her with you!

Here are a few I found online:

Rain

There Lives a Young Girl. (I really like that one.)

My prompt today involves another poem of hers:  "Memory." I would like you to read the poem and choose a line or two to incorporate into a poem you write.  Hopefully, it will spark your own memories:

Memory
by Tev Ditlevsen

My mother and father were happy. Down the street
they skipped, giddy like children lost in their own game.
And it was a Sunday. Every flagstone rang out
with the loud clacking of my father’s wooden cane.

My mother was young. I never noticed before.
She wore her white linen dress and did up her hair.
As we ran through the gate to Søndermarken Park,
her laughter carried on the balmy summer air.

A rush of joy lifted from the sharp smell of grass,
from beer and fizzy drinks and slices of roast beef.
And a budding hope quivered in the summer breeze:
My mother is happy. My father sheds his grief.

I remember no other day like that Sunday.
A childhood passed. My father was quiet and grey.
My mother was always sad from that moment on,
guarding secret longings she would never betray.

Only in the memory does my heart find peace.
My mother was young, only I noticed too late.
My father was happy. And joy resides somewhere
just beyond Søndermarken Park’s green wooden gate.

A few suggested/possible lines:  "My mother and father were happy,"  My mother was young. I never noticed before."  "A rush of joy lifted from the sharp smell of grass." "I remember no other day like that Sunday (or Monday or Wednesday, etc".  And there are many, many more.

Read the poem a few times, and something will come to you!

After you write your poem, link it using Mr. Linky below. Don't forget to comment on the poems of others.  Mr. Linky will be open until Sunday night 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

Small Kindnesses

Christine Lowther photo

SMALL KINDNESSES

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

- Danusha Lameris

Ms Lameris is an award-winning poet who served as Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County from 2018 to 2020. I came across this wonderful poem and thought about how kindness - those small daily kindnesses we don't think much about - are scattered across our days like sunshine. Small interactions that warm our hearts bring out the very best of what it is to be a human in this world, and make us feel our kinship with those around us.

I am a fan, (as you may have noticed) of the ordinary joys and comforts in life. I have never had much in the way of materialism, never wanted it, but I am rich in the simple pleasures, the ordinary joys, the small daily kindnesses we encounter as we go about our days.

I happened upon this next poem from a favourite poet of mine - a very inspiring woman - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and thought it might spark some ideas. Rosemerry lost her sixteen year old son to suicide in 2022. Her poems after his death are inspiring, full of deep love.

After Years of Pretending I Could Do It All

I said yes today when Linda asked
if I’d like a nutritious drink to go.
You’ll need the protein, she said, as she slipped
the bottle into a paper bag. I said yes
when she offered to bring me food later.
Said yes when she offered to bring me wine.
And when Steve said, Let’s go outside,
I said yes. Yes as he showed me the best spot
to sit to face east in the morning. Yes
as he showed me the place to face west.
And later when Joan asked if she could hold me—
one palm to my chest, one palm to my back,
her forehead touched to my shoulder—
I said yes. I said yes as she helped me
to carry boxes and bags. Said yes
as she handed me water. I, the queen of no,
said yes. I, who have thought I could do it
alone, I who desperately want to not be a burden,
I who have longed for control,
I who have made a small cell out of no
said yes and felt the doors of reluctance
swing open then fall off their hinges then
dissolve into gratefulness. How long
have I thought I needed to do this alone?
How long have I clung to this island
of separateness? How sweet
it tastes, this yes. Like chocolate,
with thirty grams of protein no less.
Like pure water, offered in a small white cup,
something I need to live. Something I’m made of.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer


So there you go. Let's dig deep and see what comes up. Let's link our poems and visit our friends. The linky stays active till Sunday evening.

Talk/Conversation

 

~ Conversation ~

Conversation by Joni Mitchell

Most interesting to me is what conversation reveals about the characters involved.  Conversation can be easy or hard, direct or indirect, one-sided or two-sided or multi-dimensional.   

What interests you?  Give us a conversation or describe one.  Enjoy!

Some examples: 

A Time to Talk

By Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

The Death of the Hired Man

By Robert Frost

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table

Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,

She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage

To meet him in the doorway with the news

And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’

She pushed him outward with her through the door

And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said.

She took the market things from Warren’s arms

And set them on the porch, then drew him down

To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

‘When was I ever anything but kind to him?

But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.

‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?

If he left then, I said, that ended it.

What good is he? Who else will harbor him

At his age for the little he can do?

What help he is there’s no depending on.

Off he goes always when I need him most.

He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,

Enough at least to buy tobacco with,

So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.

“All right,” I say, “I can’t afford to pay

Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.”

“Someone else can.” “Then someone else will have to.”

I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself

If that was what it was. You can be certain,

When he begins like that, there’s someone at him

Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—

In haying time, when any help is scarce.

In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.’

‘Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,’ Mary said.

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

Death is a Dialogue between

By Emily Dickinson

 Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
"Dissolve" says Death -- The Spirit "Sir
I have another Trust" --

Death doubts it -- Argues from the Ground --
The Spirit turns away
Just laying off for evidence
An Overcoat of Clay.

💛💛💛

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.