2024 - day seven

 The prompt is 'wish you were here', postcard style.

I wish you were here . . . 

I wish you were here with me,

Now, today, sharing the wind

And blustering sea.

I wish I could share with you

The washing on the line,

And the island view.

(c) 2ndwitch (I do not usually offer a dedication but I dedicate this short poem to Cookiepuss.)

2024 - day four

 The prompt is to take inspiration from a book called The Strangest Things in the World.

The Complex Spider's Web.

it is well known that spiders make webs

and that they spin the gossamer threads

into a spiralised net to entrap flies

and keep them there until dead

but we should not just look at the web

but at what it might symbolise

in the way its threads interweave

to entrap the fly until it dies

but is it the web that is complex

or the spider that weaves its trap

and that reads the vibrations

as a single use auditory map?

(c) 2ndwitch, 04/04/24

Day the twenty-eighth

Today the prompt is to describe a bedroom from your past.


And so to sleep.

Wallpaper with poppies and other spring flowers
Rioting all over it, but on a white background, and
The seams not quite smooth which are a great
Temptation to a small child to pick and poke at.

A shelf, mysteriously sitting at the side of the room,
And a step below it; adulthood tells me that this box
Is there to accommodate the stairs beneath, but
As a small child it was a puzzle and an intrigue.

A white chest of drawers with clothes from a bygone
Age within it, perfume bottles from a different life,
And false pearls and costume brooches that
Sparkle in the evening sun and tempt little fingers.

A window ledge behind the curtain, a space a small
Child could sit in and read after bedtime, until
She is spotted by her grandfather who lives just
A few raindrops away, and a phone call results.

This was the room that I knew, this was the room of the
Days when I was normal and had two parents and things
Were not all wrong and horrid, but when they sent me away
I came home to no father and a different bedroom.

Day the twenty-seventh

Today the challenge is write a poem as a review of something.


Waiting

It would be better if there was a time limit
I think, and a sense of where the beginning
Begins and where the end might begin
To be an end or at least to stop being
A perpetual beginning.

It would be better if the people who are
In charge of this had any idea what
They were doing and if they listened
To people who are not in charge but who
Do know what they are doing.

It would also be better if someone could
Arrange the weather so that instead of
Days of dreich and rain and clouds and mist
And misery we had a spell of constant sun
Lasting until at least the beginning of the end.


Overall I fear I can only give one out of ten.

Day the twenty-fifth

Today the prompt is to be inspired by a given poem. I took the words "in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed".

Last days

In every room in this abandoned house
There lives a memory, subsisting on dust
And echoes, and wearing just
A shawl across weary shoulders
That have borne a life of rainstorm and trial.

Silent footsteps pave across the floor and
Their tread is imagined in every sheet of paper
Tossed untidily aside when the last
Living residents left so precipitously,
And a single glove sits
Upon a chair and offers a mute lament for its
Long lost companion.

                                    The sleepless years
Of waiting can never ease the death
And destruction of mankind in its last days
And the pain never rests on couch or bed.