New Baby Blues
I rue the day my mom acquired my new baby brother.
I wish that she’d return him and come back with another.
When I first saw him, he was cute and I was rather proud,
but that’s before I knew the fact that he would be so loud.
When he cries, he makes a sort of ear-splitting sharp bleating
all the time Mom’s in the kitchen seeing to the heating
of the bottle used to apportion out his dinner.
You’d think for all the fuss he makes that he was growing thinner,
Yet I swear that day-by-day, to my great disgust
that he’s growing bigger—fatter and more robust!
And when he isn’t sleeping or drinking or deranged,
he is damp or poopie and insisting to be changed.
I think this baby’s broken and I think we need a new one.
I asked if I could go along when they go to view one,
but Mommy says there’s no return because this one is used,
while Daddy uttered not a word—just stood looking amused.
It really isn’t funny, though. In fact, I’m most annoyed
that they have less time for me now that they’re employed
taking care of baby—making sure he’s fed and well
while all this time I’ve been here too, living in baby Hell!
He’s diapered, held and cuddled, sung to and adored
while his older sister sits here feeling bored.
They say that I’ll feel different once he’s more grown up,
but if it were up to me, I’d trade him for a pup!
Prompt words today are proud, heating, apportion, damp and rue.
I went to the polo matches in Sheridan, Wyoming with my sister and brother-in-law and their friends today. There were polo players from all over the world there as well as a diverse audience. The African Gray parrots are the team mascots of one of the teams and attend all of their matches. Both their mom and their dad are polo players and owners of the team. The bulldog is also a regular member of the audience and meanders at will.
Click on flowers to enlarge view.
For Cee’s FOTD
Hiraeth*
When I went traveling, missives from home
awaited me everywhere I chose to roam.
Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Dakar—
No matter how foreign, no matter how far,
as I traveled by boat and auto and train,
over and over and over again
at postal restante, the letters they came—
varied in handwriting, varied in name.
Neighbors and cousins and aunts in strange places—
names conjuring up familiar old faces—
Letters at each port—sometimes a small pile—
arrived as I piled up mile after mile
of distance between the places I’d known
and all the new places to which I had flown
that spectacular trip of four months duration—
that long yearned-for chance for global education.
In that time before cellphones and internet and
when communication was all done by hand,
I still felt a bond with home and my past,
no hopeless feeling that I had been cast
into a strange world where I had no place.
My mother insured that this wasn’t the case,
for note after note conjured up the warm heart
of all of the people who’d been there from the start.
Later I found that since I’d left home,
to quench that long yearning to discover and roam,
each letter home that I’d written and sent,
my mother had copied and then she had leant
to the local paper who published them all
from the time that I left in the early fall
to the time four months later when I opened my pack
to reveal all the letters folks had written back!
Past teachers and uncles that I’d never known,
wrote insuring that I’d never feel all alone.
And each time I opened one, glad as I was
to be out in the midst of the the world’s alien buzz,
nonetheless I felt hiraeth raise its warm head
and for a time felt nostalgia instead.
Thus with one hand did my mother let go
to allow me the freedom that I needed so
while with the other she created a tether
that bound my two worlds securely together.
Prompt words for today are hiraeth, *a deep longing for home, hopeless, spectacular, missive and train.
True story.
Air Conditions
Grandma was neither meek nor mild and she was not abused.
The thought of any man ruling her makes me most amused.
But she was parsimonious when it came to waste,
scraping each bit of cookie dough to give us all a taste.
The weather could be sweltering before she used the fan.
“No need to run the light bill up just because I can!”
she’d quip when we expressed our feeble pleas for cool air,
but she allowed no wasteful behavior in her private lair.
Though she was far from venal, one tactic seemed to work,
for along with penny-pinching, my grandma had one quirk.
Her appetite for sugar was beyond compare,
so we’d produce the chocolate and then flip on the air!!!
She’d rifle through the chocolate box for caramels and nuts,
for when it came to favorites, she expressed no ifs or buts.
For summer after summer, this was Grandma’s rule.
So long as supplies lasted, everything was cool.
Prompt words today are sweltering, parsimonious, meek, venal and abused.
