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.

Day the seventeenth

Today the prompt is 'forgotten technology' and doggerel wins the day. My thanks to Ivan Drever for recording the album that came to a sticky end!

I've ne're forgotten

Today I have to tell you a tale of loss and woe,
A rainy day's tale of deep disaster
So sad a tale, as sad as these things go,
A tale to cause real tears (although of laughter!)

I was cooking in the kitchen as I often did
Baking cakes to bring us pleasure and much joy.
I had music in there with me, a necessary aid
For music helps to further every ploy.



I had a tin of treacle, and I needed just one spoon
But it was set and hard as iron in the tin
So in order to make it softer, and do it very soon,
To the nice hot waiting oven it went in.

I waited for ten minutes, to get it nice and warm,
And while waiting changed cassettes, as you do.
Never thinking that the heat would do me any harm
It would simply make the tinful less like glue!




I'd put the tape down on the side, to wait till I was done,
And grabbed a towel to keep my hands from burning,
But the towel was wet and I dropped that tin
And hot treacle is runny as I was learning . . .

I dowsed the tape and stood on its case
My legs were all sticky and spattered
The tape was a goner, I'd need to replace,
And as for the case it was battered!

So the end of this tale, I am sad to relate,
Was one dead cassette and not even one cake!

Day the sixteenth

Today the prompt it to praise in the superlative. I may have turned this upside down . . .

you

your hair is oily and rank
your teeth are black and broken
your oxters are ripe and most dank
and your smile is a useless wee token
your nails are filthy and blackened
your knees are scabbed over with scale
your sneezing should never have happened
and your breath is rancid and stale
you don't wear a coat when it's raining
you don't wear a scarf in the snow
your chatter is not entertaining
and you spread misery wherever you go

Day the fourteenth

Today the prompt is a poem, poet or person that is your inspiration. My thoughts turn straightway to Edwin Muir . . .

The horses

The day the horses returned was the first day of normal rain.
That morning the clouds had foregathered in massed ranks
Of steel grey cushions, sky bound in wind-driven train,
A storm of nature's making, and we could give thanks.

Until this day the world had rained poison and dripped death,
Echoes of armageddon reverberated in each thunder clap,
And fear laced the raindrops, the wind's ice-sharded breath
Seemed to us, cowered in shelter, to be one more killing trap.

But once the radios were silent, and the ships had sailed on,
The skies slowly lightened, night brought the moon out and stars,
We slowly emerged in the tentative light of a revisiting sun
To walk once again on the land that in healing was ours.

And this day the clouds brought us rain and a promise
And in the evening the horses to join us in harness.

Day the eighth

Today the prompt is to use a line from another poem - plagiarise in fact!


If . . .

To shiver like a root in the rain
To tremble like a wind-struck leaf
To venture one tentative step once again
To challenge the end with belief.

To dance like the storm in her eyes
To float as though eagled with wings
To cast a blanket of fear on the skies
Is to wait for the pain future brings.

Day the fourth

Today the prompt is to base a poem around a remembered image from a dream.

Rainstorm

The road is long, it stretches from the cross
to the motorway bridge
And I have to walk it every day, once one way
and once the other.
In my dreams the road never ends, I have to
keep on walking
Walking, walking, with the raindrops running
Down my neck.
My coat gets more and more soaked and the
water runs into my shoes,
Soaking my socks and sending shivers back
up to my knees.
My hands become wrinkled and waxy, not able
to grip or articulate,
And the perpetual rain keeps running down and
dripping off my nose.