Month: February 2019

poetry

Grateful for My Life

carolyncordon

For today’s poetry prompt – #poemadayfeb (pillow), I thought about my life, and the lives of other’s some more fortunate than me, others, less so … I have always had a comfy pillow, and as much bedding as I need to keep warm through the night. Others may not even have a room to sleep in, let alone a pillow.

The world can be such a cruel place for some people, while other, more fortunate and privileged people have everything they could ever want or need. It isn’t ‘fair’, the way these things are allocated, but it’s what we have, this life. All we can do, if we are not at the top, is to find the best way to live our lives.

As I indicate in the poem, I am one of the fortunate people in the middle, having enough of everything I need, and quite a bit of what I want too. I have a home, electricity, food, water, enough money to run a car, with more money to attend events I wish to attend. I am grateful for this, and certainly realise my lot in life is a fortunate one indeed.

Is it luck that dictates of life’s position? I was lucky enough to have been born to a comfortably situated middle-class family, hard-working parents, working to give their children all they could. I gained my education, then easily got a job, and went on to get married, have a child, and could leave work, with a good life-style …

Now, my son has left home, and I can continue living a fine life, getting all I want and need, not splashing cash around, but definitely comfortably well off. I realise I am lucky. Earlier today, at a poetry event, we were talking about people who are definitely not well off. They are the poor people, destitute, poverty-stricken.

These people live in the same towns as us, but live their lives differently, in the same places and at the same times, sometimes, but in different ways. I pay for my flat white coffee, the poor person receives their drink for free, both of us have free water available to us at the same hotel, that we both visit from time to time.

I drive my car to get there, my home being many miles away, they walk, their own home being somewhere within walking distance, always, because walking is their only option. I paid my taxes, when I was a worker, my husband did too, we both pay GST for what we buy … Society is there to make sure all can get enough to survive, or it should be. Life is a weird gamble, and I got lucky …

Life’s a Gamble

I wake up every morning –

with pillow, sheets, blanket.

I bathe, dress, breakfast

& coffee available to make …

 

I think on others, who

after a rude awakening,

scramble out from their

uncertain resting place –

 

No food for them, not until

the charity workers arrive

and they can search out

their allotted rations.

 

Do any of us deserve

what life has, or hasn’t

given us? Is it a gamble

some win, others lose?

 

Privileged few, with much,

many more with some,

the sorry few with little –

that’s life’s cruel lottery …

poetry

Rusty Thoughts

carolyncordon

I can’t believe it, I just accidentally ditched my blog post again, before I’d finished creating it! This is getting beyond a joke. I haven’t done today’s poem yet though, but I know the poetry prompt for #poemadayfeb for the 23rd of the month is “Rust”. I am now heading off to a word document, so I can do the rest of this post, including a poem, and won’t lose it again!

************************

Back again, with my thoughts and poem for this new poetry prompt. Phew!

Rust is there in the lives of us all, to some extent, I’m sure, out in the country though, I’m sure there is more rust. We live on a small rural zoned property, with a fair bit of mostly bare earth, and sometimes find rusted horseshoes, great big ones, far bigger than the ones my horse training dad put on his harness racing horses.

The paddocks around here, of which there are many, would have been ploughed, and sown and reaped, with the services of the trusted Clydesdale horse (or similar heavy horse). Those great big horseshoes would have come from such a horse, as the land our house was built on would have previously been farmland, as is all of the land around our home.

Rust is what happens to metal when it oxidises. So when metal is exposed to moisture and oxygen, it oxidises and degrades (goes rusty), and rusted bits flake off. Or something vaguely like that – I’m neither a clever researcher nor a scientist …

Another fact in my life relating to “rust” is that the horse my father had at one stage in his stables, was a gentle plodder, former harness racing horse, named (I think) Rusty Roads. I think Dad may have saved Rusty, as we called him, from certain death at the knackery, and gave him to us kids to ride. It was fun for a while, but I can’t remember when it was we had him, or when he went, the facts of it have rusted away. So many horses came and went at the stables, as always happens …

Graham and I now have a ‘decoration’ on the front veranda. It is about the size of a dog, and is in fact the shake of a dog, made out of corrugated iron. There is a collar around the neck with the name “Rusty” attached to it. We bought him on a trip to Sydney, because we had a little bit of money to spare and both liked the look of him. Rusty guards our front door, from where he sits, chained loosely to one of the veranda posts.

IMAG0113_1.jpg

 

I still don’t have a poem yet though, do I? I’m thinking haiku or something small like that …

********************************8

No, I wrote a thoughtful little poem about a terrible thing, and hope others may find it as interesting as reading, as I found writing this. It’s about some things I’ve been thinking about, the possible reasons that men commit suicide, a terrible way to end a life, I feel, awful for anyone to feel so low that death seems a better thing to them.

If the poem to follow sparks problems for you, please call:

Lifeline tel:1-800-273-8255 or seek other help

 

Anyway, here is today’s poem, and I have caught up – back again tomorrow with a new blog post about the new poetry prompt:

 

Rusty Horseshoe

What was the suicide rate

for farmers in the olden days,

I wonder? As high as nowadays?

One horse powered farming

compared to the massive

machines used now –

I’m thinking about

the gentle task of tending

to the gentle giant who’d pull

the plow, & take kids for a ride –

big brown eyes, solid

& dependable, always …

Uncategorized

Thinking About the Sun

carolyncordon

I’m running behind a little with the #poemadayfeb challenge. I need to write a poem about the sun, which was yesterday’s prompt, and then check out what the prompt is for today, and write a poem based on that prompt, and of course, put both of my poems up here on this blog, the ‘Sun’ poem first, and then another post for whatever today’s prompt is. Fun, fun, fun.

Not so much fun is the fact that I had already written my poem for yesterday’s prompt, an in depth bit of discussion and then a lengthy poem of quite a few words, that I lost by accidentally hitting the wrong key, and making it just disappear, never to be seen again. So instead, I will write a stripped back poem, possibly encompassing some of the thoughts from the post that disappeared.

And this time I will make sure I don’t make the whole thing disappear. Writing these things on something else and then doing a copy/paste thing is a much safer idea, so I think I’ll finish this off somewhere else. But I’ll be back, don’t you worry about that!

***********************************

OK, I’m back, as I said I would be, and I now have a very, very stripped back poem compared to the original one which I carelessly destroyed, never to be seen again …

I think I prefer this poem, or I may be trying to gee myself up so I don’t hate myself for being so silly and destroying all of those words. The other poem had some of my research in it, that I did earlier today, and it had a photo of a mandarin tree, and some things about photosynthesis, and such things. Not this time though, that’s all gone.

imag0584_1_1

Instead, I have this photograph of the moon, I think from the full moon before the previous one. I don’t remember why I took the photo now, but it was there, I was there (outside on the back veranda), and so I did. This photo, as the photo of the now forever lost blog post, is relevant to the poem, which I will post right here! Thanks for visiting, feel free to add to the discussion if you wish too!

**************************

Sun Thoughts

Black sky, pinprick stars

each a sun, eons old

possibly dead, but

visible to us, somehow …

 

Eastern glow, bright ball

rising, sky’s sunrise hues

then that azure sky

Australians love so much.

 

Sun rising, rising

temperature’s rise too,

then sunset colours

and evening comes –

 

black, and the moon,

those stars, and each star

with its planets,

and each planet, its moons –

 

our solar system,

each star’s solar systems,

galaxy upon galaxy

swirling together, moving.

 

All together, making up

the universe, moving,

ageing, dying, as we too,

move, age and will die …

poetry

Turning Japanese

carolyncordon

The poetry prompt for yesterday was a poetic form, the Katauta poem. This is another Japanese poetry form, almost identical to haiku, in that they both are three lined poems with syllable counts of 5/7/5 syllables (or fewer). The difference is that with this poetic form there are two stanzas, with each being written by a different person, with one, with the second being a reply to the first.

 

It is written by a pair of lovers, in the Japanese form, but that didn’t suit my life situation at all – happily married for over thirty years, sooky love stuff well and truly over & done with! I think I know my husband well enough by now, to realise he would not be interested in writing in this particular poetic form. 

Nothing wrong with that, we all so our own thing, and that is fine, so I came up with another way to use this particular form. I like to use my creativity to work my way around issues like this!

 

Instead of the truly Japanese way of doing this poetic form, I have taken McTavish the Cat and Buster the Dog, two creatures who live in the imaginations of a writer friend of mine (cat) and mine (dog).

 

These two creatures will feature in book four of the Buster the Dog series, that began with “Dig It! Gardening Tips for Dogs”, which was followed by “Doggone It! Mindfulness from a Dog’s Point of View”, and, I thought, with “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”.

 

I had thought these three books said all I and Buster the Dog needed to say, but my friend had other ideas, and so along came McTavish the Cat!

 

So, these two creatures end up living in the same house, after a relationship  break up, and then a new one starting. Buster the Dog, and his ‘owner’ move into McTavish the Cat’s owner’s house, and work out how they can all live together. Buster the Dog and McTavish the Cat, might not normally have joined together to become best friends,  but such is nature of adversity, and ganging up on a common ‘foe’.

The pair, a dog and a cat, have both previously actively avoided getting too close, but when you live in the same household there are far fewer ways to keep away from each other, and they come to realise they have a lot more in common than they had realised.

 

Things, are very tricky at the start,  but they eventually work out their issues with each other, as they continue finding ways to make life hell for their ‘owners’ and eventually building a loving friendship that is beautiful, hence the poem for this day:

 

Your feline grace –

you flow across the room

like no other can …

 

Your canine calm –

you fill the room with peace,

embracing all …

poetry

A New Poetic Form?

carolyncordon

 A Tritern? I’m not sure if the poetic form of today’s poem I wrote today for the #poemadayfeb challenge, has an actual name, but Tritern is my attempt at giving it one, if it doesn’t already have one. It is a poetic form based a little on the Quatern (details for that style below)

Tritern:

9 lines, broken into 3 stanzas of three lines each
Each line has 9 syllables

The first line of the poem is the refrain,

In second stanza the refrain is the second line

In third (final) stanza refrain is final (third) line.

Rhyming or non rhyming as poet wishes.

*************************

This is the Quatern: it has 16 lines broken up into 4 quatrains (or 4-line stanzas).

  1. Each line is comprised of eight syllables.
  2. The first line is the refrain. In the second stanza, the refrain appears in the second line; in the third stanza, the third line; in the fourth stanza, the fourth (and final) line.
  3. There are no rules for rhyming or iambics.

*********************************

OK, now onto my poem for the 20th of February 2019, based on/inspired by, thinking about people who are good people, but have been beaten down by life. They will brush themselves down, get up and give it another try, because they want to be the kind of person they would like and respect.
Life’s journey can be a difficult one, a marathon of rough terrain, but crossing the winning line in front of others is a fail, if you cross the line in a helicopter.

 

The theme is ‘Last’

 

Who are the Losers?

 

Coming last, losing, beaten by all,

humiliated, defeated, but

isn’t just trying, better than not?

 

If you won’t try, you shouldn’t mock those

coming last. Losing, beaten by all,

but winners ‘cos they gave it their best.

 

Life isn’t fair, and many will cheat,

& cheaters all fail at being good –

coming last, losing, beaten by all!