Florence Weinberger: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Florence Weinberger

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Florence Weinberger

Three Poems

A Life Out of Prompts

There’s a cluster of flowers outside my window

incandescent in the morning              

dead by night

tidings everywhere

eggs, pencils (Bloom’s phallic musings)

embarrassing relatives

biblical narratives.

l

Some arrive around five

in the afternoon, just when I’m lighting the fire

under the onions and garlic.

Or they wait until later,

when I’m falling asleep.

Or they strike in the middle of the night.

Most mornings I’m left with something pithy,

barely enough heft to retrieve the gist.

I invent the rest.

l

I get old, and now when they knock at midnight

like Poe’s impatient raven, revelation in its beak,

I let it wait.

I tell myself you’ll remember.

l

I wake into syllables floating like feathers

after a pillow fight.

l

This morning, a spectacular rainbow.  A thick arc

of vivid color.

l

There you have it, prompts bent until they’re kempt.

            Authentic.

A Walk Into Wonder

The spew of old devotions that skidded and slid into

oblivion when a bit of happiness was obliterated

revived in a split second when sun rays sitting

on the water waves winked at me in chinks

of white and indigo splashes, like a code

I alone could make sense of.

I didn’t set out to form a slant like the one above.

In fact, I had no goal, all I had was the first

line and part of the second.  Now that the

lines want to indent, I feel obliged to

the shape by proceeding with an

unmediated take. Take this

morning, an unrigorous beach walk, an intentional habit

to sit down and write when I got back home. Five

mornings a week, but sometimes I oversleep,

the day shrinks, diligence fades, dusk

eats the ambition left over when

I needed to show up, grab

at the unstable spark while it’s stoked enough to get me

started, any fable or landscape grist for the mill,

trill of a wandering minstrel, screech of gulls

clearing the beach debris, dogs drinking

the foam, the grind of helicopter

blades making me look at

where it’s scanning offshore for the drowning, for

the beached boat with its load of dirty drugs,

oars drifting, men scattering. Ecstatic

skateboarders, bikers and hikers, a

guy looking hard at something,

maybe something he found

that could be valuable, possibly a personal loss to

a traveler that could be wrenching, there’s no

identification, or there is but should he take

this find as an omen, a test, this random

object fallen into his hands.  How

will his life unfold, from now?

Stoned on Tomorrow

Green Religion in Winter Bones

A.R. Ammons

Silent budding under the snow.  Prayer schemes. 

Waiting.

When God spoke, we happened, or so the story goes. 

Trees whisper and breezes bring their seductions

to the next tree.  Even mushrooms have vocabularies. 

Do budding ideas grow miraculous peonies?  Manna? 

We make blueprints, we get consultants, contractors, we

consider and we measure,

add new interest to an old recipe. 

Or we see something, anything can be a Proustian trigger,

a sudden insight, we’re stoned on tomorrow

and all seems plausible. We’re a little spent,

and what we want, what we really want, is to get home. 

Author Bio:

Six times nominated for a Pushcart, once for Best of the Net, Florence Weinberger is the author of six books of poetry, most recently These Days of Simple Mooring, winner of the Blue Light Press Book Award. Poems have appeared in journals including Calyx, Rattle, Mantis, River Styx, Ellipsis, Poet Lore, Comstock Review, Baltimore Review, Nimrod, Cider Press Review, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and numerous anthologies.