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’

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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."

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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?

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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.

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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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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.

.

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© J Cosmo Newbery 2013

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