I have the day off today. Yesterday was good again, particularly my home-made lunch of chicken & coleslaw sandwiches and a pudding of jelly (sorry, Tory Boy; but you forgot to take them with you and they have a sell-by date). I haven’t eaten jelly for years; it was delicious, if mushy.
It was while eating lunch that I overheard this: ‘I have to clean three times a day, every day; I think I caught that OCD off me mate.’
I have learned some stuff this week, so it has been worth the effort of getting out of my pyjamas before ten. I am a bit slow on the uptake, though: it was only yesterday that I realised the course has an actual name, Launch Pad; we are ladies who launch. It also clicked that everyone except me is a single mother. That explains the three-hour session on childcare provision and benefits. I was wondering.
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I thought last night’s leaders’ debate was much better than last week’s; we saw some blood and guts, at least. David Cameron’s problem is still that he’s too polite, however; that’s the problem with being well brought up.
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Today is St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s purported birth and death days. As one sounds like a great story and the other wrote a great story, it is fitting that they share a date. I will be out waving the flag in our local park tomorrow; I wonder if the George Formby Society will be present? Nothing says ‘English’ like a bunch of old men on ukuleles.
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This prompt is a wordle:
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If you haven’t come across it before, a wordle is a picture of words, like a category or tag cloud on a blog. You put in a whole bunch of text and it makes a picture, with the most-used words appearing bigger than the least-used words. Here’s a wordle of what I have written so far:
Um, scrap that…I’m on the Hub’s computer and I’m not allowed to change anything without his permission and Wordle wants me to install thingies before it creates a wordle for me and I dare not on pain of prolonged tickling of the feet, so you’ll have to have a go yourself.
We were supposed to use one or all of the words in the wordle. I went with ‘reverberate’ because I was thinking of ‘the shot heard around the world’ which exemplifies the meaning of the word, but I left it out in the end, because it didn’t work in the poem.
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Why I Left South Africa
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A bullet cudgelled
a child’s skull,
forcing hatred from me.
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The Laughing Housewife 
I just read the last half dozen or so of your posts and I enjoyed them very much. I like what my words sparked in you, even if none of them actually appeared in the final poem 🙂
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Thanks Catherine. I thought it was a great prompt. I suspect ‘skull’ came from ‘squall’. I first worked on a poem about the Berlin Wall; if I tell you that I had the line, ‘the cement trowel that reverberated around the world,’ you will see why I gave up on it. 🙂 For me, the value of prompts is in what they, well, prompt you to write, even if the original prompt disappears. I am pleased with this poem; that’s not always the case, so I have you to thank for it.
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Powerful stuff, but the last line is ambiguous: surely forcing hatred into you?
And can a bullet cudgel? More like pierce or drill, but those would be short of a syllable. Sorry Tilly, that’s how I see it, but you know I usually love your poems.
ViV
XOX
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I mean it in the sense of forcing me to both feel and express hate; hate which I had never felt before (or since).
‘cudgel’ came after a long search for the right word. When you cudgel a human skull you basically bash the brains out; it’s brutal and messy; I wanted to show brutal and messy. Funnily enough, Viv, I wasn’t syllable counting here 🙂 Aren’t I contrary?
I’ll let you off but don’t do it again, Miss Vivienne (ooo, images of Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’ – come to think of it, you do look like her) xx
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The Incredible Spot-On Viv Strikes Again.
I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind – you are right of course: ‘forcing…from me’ says the opposite of what I want to say. I’m thinking about it and I will edit it once I have a better word.
Thanks Viv. I miss fbf; don’t you?
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Very strong sentiments expressed here, and in the short post above too. I hope you don’t have to relive more of your previous encounters with intolerance.
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Thank you.
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Cudgel. That’s my word of the day. Thank you.
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You’re welcome.
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I really like the brevity of this. Good poem. Interesting that you had a thought of the Berlin Wall also from the Wordle.
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Thanks 🙂
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Powerful. You make our American politics filled with our verbal “gotchya!”s and politically correct parsings seem feather light, cpmpared.
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Oh, I don’t know; I’ve seen ‘The West Wing’. You don’t do so bad yourself.
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Very powerful…and I’m praying that this is not true!
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The bullet hit him in the chest; the effect was the same, however.
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Wow. Talk about getting to the essence of things. Powerful, indeed.
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Thanks Brooklyn.
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