Tuesday, November 26, 2013

637 : Once in a blue moose...

A work colleague tried to tell me that Swedish Mooses
were one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases on the planet. 
I disagreed, of course, but a limerick seemed appropriate.

Once in a blue moose…

A moose that lives in cold Sweden
Does little ‘xcept feedin’ and breedin’,
It’s said that its farting
Is thoroughly disheartening
And speeds the ice cap’s recedin’
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Sunday, November 24, 2013

636 : First Flight

Sunday Scribblings has the prompt ‘Flight’.
It’s spring in Australia and the air is full of flapping.

First Flight.

All fluff and beak
And adrenalin,
Claws
Grasp
The branch 
Tightly.
Until chirps
(Or nudges)
Of encouragement
Pry them free
And, with a panicky
Squawk!
Take a leap of faith,
And fluff,
And adrenalin,
And fly!
Like an eggbeater.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

635 : The Observer

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #136) presents a list of words
that we must incorporate in a writing piece.  

The words this week are:

habits, create, however, virtue, regard, gap,
cycle, undoing, lessen, choice, gathering, suffering

In a week where Australia has been found to be hacking 
the Indonesian president's wife's phone, this seemed topical.
But spying, of course, comes in many guises.


The Observer.

Please, please
Don’t call it spying.
Call it 
Information gathering
And regard it 
As a virtue,
As a choice we make
To know our neighbours,
As ourselves.

Cycling 
Finely,
Intimately,
Through their thoughts
Quietly, 
Secretly, 
On the side,
Is one of those habits
That is hard to stop
That is hard to drop
And it’s good for us to know...

We rationalize.

However
One man’s virtue 
Can be another man’s 
Undoing;
Attempts to lessen
Misunderstanding
To reduce the gap, 
As it were,
Between what is said
And what is meant
Can lead to suffering
If what you learn,
The truth of the matter,
Hurts.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Friday, November 22, 2013

634 : The Moppet

dVerse Poets challenges us to write a Nerudan ode.

The Moppet

Sweet and pure
To the viewer,
All flounce and bounce,
And basely pure,
A coquette
With hair hot-curled
And perfect skin
Brushed 
And glowing
To defy her age,
In frocks
And smocks
And bobby socks
And yet her eyes
Are knowing
Of her role—
A toy thing
In a corporate world.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Thursday, November 21, 2013

633 : Shackled

Three Word Wednesday requires participants
to use the three words of the week in a composition.
The words this week were bitter, manipulate and tight.


Shackled

Politicians manipulate—
A universal rule.
When things are tight 
They lie like thieves
And take us all for fools.

Docile
We feign a limpid smile.

Grieve, but passively collude—
Collude and so capitulate
To bitter servitude.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

632 : Doomed to Fry


“God is a woman”, says my spy,
"All men are doomed to forever fry:
They know perfectly well
They’ll be sent down to Hell,
To roast, 
But they'll never know why."
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Monday, November 18, 2013

631 : A fellow who'd frequently jest...

Mad Kane has a weekly limerick challenge.
She provides the first line,
The rest is up to us:


A fellow who’d frequently jest
Has sadly been laid to his rest.
They thought he was joking
When he said he was choking,
As a gag, it was one of his best.

◊◊◊

Godiva was speaking in jest
When she offered to horse-ride, undressed.
But when put on the spot,
She discarded the lot—
Those who peeked were clearly impressed.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Sunday, November 17, 2013

630 : The Professional Woman

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #135) presents a list of words
that we must incorporate in a writing piece.  

The words this week are:

race, silky, lanky, whiskey, puddle, pain, mouth
isolate, murky, breath, marsh, razor, befuddled


The Professional Woman.

The Youth
Full of promise
She stands proud;
Tall, lanky, silky haired,
A bloom is seen upon her:
The first warm peach of summer.

The Woman
Life can turn on a razor’s edge,
Decisions taken lightly,
Lead to murky and dark places.
The urgent breath from the mouths 
Of strange men 
Warms her neck 
And pays her bills.

The Old Woman
Her attractions have faded
And she lives in a marsh,
A swamp of befuddled pain
And whiskey driven relief.
Unloved and unwanted
She sits and watches the rain.

The Grave
Life, we are told, is a race
Some win, some struggle
And many lose.
Some lose worse than others.
And take up small plots
In isolated corners, 
Unmarked and unlamented.
Rain pock marks the puddles,
But it too is uncaring.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---


Thursday, November 14, 2013

629 : Best served cold.

Three Word Wednesday requires participants
to use the three words of the week in a composition.
The words this week were aggressive, heighten and limited.

Best served cold.

Things can be thrown aggressively
And bridges can be burnt;
In the process the mind shuts down—
No lessons can be learnt.
Sadness follows from this madness
Around a limited sense of right.
Revenge is taken progressively
Which heightens the delight.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

628 : A woman whose morals were lax...

Mad Kane has a regular limerick challenge.
She provides the first line,
the rest is up to us.

Illustration provided by a
New South Welsh reader.

A woman whose morals were lax,
Despite some corrective firm smacks,
Dressed up in deep scarlet,
And lived as the harlots
Who spent all the night on their backs.

◊◊

A duck, whose bowels were quite lax,
Had severe diahorrea attacks.
He thought it unfair
That he missed Medicare
And had to be treated by quacks.

◊◊

A fellow was terribly lax
In filling and filing his tax.
But in the auditor’s pursuit
They missed all his loot
Buried in the garden, in sacks.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Sunday, November 10, 2013

627 : No Man's Land

Sunday Whirl (Wordle #134) presents a list of words
that we must incorporate in a writing piece.  

The words this week are:

buckle, gain, miss, instant, navigate, grace
visions, humming, drill, dignity, years, stride

Tomorrow, November 11th, is Armistice Day.


No Man’s Land

The poppies wave in the breeze,
Vibrant.  Enchanting.  
Deep red.  Blood red.
But with black hearts.
Visions of grace and dignity over the years,
They are symbols of missed opportunities,
Symbols of the bloody waste
That is human warfare.

Every year we look at them, 
These beautiful poppies,
And our mind navigates the ugly 
And painful story that they embody,
To a prettier place.

We see visions of young men
Proudly striding in their uniforms,
Cleanly pressed, buckles gleaming,
Marching, in a well polished drill,
Passing through our streets.
Triumphant.
Crowds cheer, wave flags,
Humming patriotic songs 
As the procession passes from view,
Happy that for a brief instant 
They shared the glory,
The clean, crisp sanitized glory.

No battlefield for them,
No cold, wide-eyed panic,
No stench of death and decay.
No holding a dying compatriot.
They do not share these things,
They stay on the warm side of no man’s land.
Where the sweet poppies grow.

But like a low thunder on the horizon,
The threat of war is still there, always there.
One has to ask, for all who have died,
What did we gain?
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

.

Friday, November 08, 2013

626 : Jemima Paddy Duck


Idle thoughts from a Balinese rice field…

Jemima Paddy Duck
(Apologies to Beatrix Potter).

This is the story of a duck
Who lived amongst the rice.
She grew quite fat on worms and snails
And life was rather nice.

But for every ying there is a yang,
For light there is a shade;
A balance in the universe –
What grows must too decay.

And so the duck with the lucky life
Met the axe’s force
And appeared upon the dinner plate
With rice and hoi-sin sauce.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---

Monday, November 04, 2013

625 : The Coffee Grinder



Posted from beside a pool in Bali.

The Coffee Grinder

He is old, somewhere over eighty,
Brown, creased and nearly toothless;
Indelible signs of a long life, well lived.
With pride, he showed us his coffee factory,
A wonder of function and innovation.

Filtered through a translator,
He talked of the beans
And their passage through the process.
Of the sorting, the roasting, the sieving and grinding 
That lead to the fine, brown, aromatic powder
Stored in lined, woven bags.
He urged us to smell and we obeyed.

Coffee will never be the same again;
All future cups will be infused with the echo
Of the memories
Of the aroma 
Of the old man
Met in that dark building
In the Balinese jungle.

He also talked,
Through the translator,
Of his love for his wife,
Of his loneliness since she had died.
As we left, I went to shake his hand.
But instead he put his arms around me,
Embraced me warmly
And, with tears in his eyes,
Asked “When will you be coming back”
No translation was necessary.
.
---
© J Cosmo Newbery 2013
---