Not Quite Leaping Puddles

By Barbara Blanks

This collection of award winning poems captures the extremes, in-betweens, and sunbeams people experience—past and present, humorous and serious.

Obviously life is neither all good nor all bad—all we can do is splash from puddle to puddle. Sometimes landing in puddles is fun. Sometimes they hide sinkholes. It’s always our choice how we deal with it. Still, while we’re in mid-leap—oh, the possibilities!

From Eve winning the battle of the sexes, to Elvis resting his pelvis; from a civil war post office to social media, from survival to recovery, Barbara Blanks believes “grief is no place to linger or dwell.”

She also refuses to have a “rendezvous with death” because she doesn’t want to leave “this most amazing place.”

She “tastes poetry, crunching it like popcorn.” and pretends she knows the words to “the sound of Moses.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365840968

Book preview

Not Quite Leaping Puddles

NOT QUITE LEAPING PUDDLES

by

Barbara Blanks

Copyright 2017 by Barbara Blanks

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without written permission from the author, except for reviewers who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-365-84096-8

The author may be contacted at:

www.barbara-blanks.com,

[e-mail],

or

[e-mail]

For everyone who leaps puddles …

and for those who splash through them

After the Rain

Skim of mud

S 

k

i

d

of      foot

Sidewalk dancing

THEN

No Spare Ribs

limerick series

In the Garden of Eden a woman

had assets exposed—so assumin’

Eve got satisfaction

from Adam’s reaction—

that’s why sinning started mushroomin’.

It wasn’t the snake or the apple

that made the two of them grapple.

She had what he wanted,

and she was undaunted

by lack of some bridesmaids or chapel.

It turns out—and this is no fib—

Eve established the first women’s lib.

In the battle of sexes

she had no complexes,

and shared more than just Adam’s rib.

Ancient Mariners

"… this sea, whose gently awful stirrings

seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath."

~Ishmael (from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville)

One Ishmael, thirteen, usurped by a half-brother,

cast away on a sea of sand by his father.

Set adrift with his mother, they carried only

a skin of water and some bread for survival.

Was he tormented by this rejection,

made worse because it met with God’s approval?

He became a great archer, but arrows

couldn’t pin down a father’s love.

What truths did he face

before he turned his hand against other men?

What albatross hung around Ishmael’s neck?

Another Ishmael, in deep spiritual depression,

cast away on a whaler’s sea,

trapped aboard ship with an obsessive captain

bent on destroying the great white

embodiment of evil.

Death crested on ever shifting waves,

not always visible,