Here’s to Your Good Health – Day 16

Picture ex Pexels

 

Here’s to Your Good Health 

 

Since you are a weary traveller who will soon recover

Since you are a singer  relating tender messages

Since you are a warrior teaching survival skills in a modern world

Since you are a writer, don’t give the plot away: here’s to your good health.

 

Since you are the failed, yet know this will not always be your place in the group

Since you are a dancer spread your arms to the sky

Since you are a quilter, stitch roses and beans, flying ducks and lakes

Since you are a beachcomber; another beach to rid of waste:

here’s to the health of beaches worldwide.

 

Since you are the actor, you too need your stamina and maybe a late night tipple

Since you are a deep-sea diver but you no longer dive for the oil companies

Since you are a teacher, the young are the ones who will teach us how to live

Since you are the lovers; weary, singing, surviving, writing, failed, dancing,

quilting, beachcombing, acting, diving, teaching – lovers, lovers, lovers.

 

Here’s to your good health.

 

Benita Kape (c) 16.4.2019

 

Prompt Day 16: Today, I challenge you to write a poem that uses the form of a list to defamiliarize the mundane.

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Ode to Frosty Mornings – Day 15

Prompt Day 15: write a monologue – please note this is the Southern Hemisphere and April for us is Autumn

 

Ode to Frosty Mornings      

 

O frost, must you come knocking on my door

so early in the year. I have memories of you,

every year, time and again; walking barefoot

to school. When from the hedge (a prickly

hedge) the plaintive cry of a kitten. She was

too young to have known any days of a warm

summer, but warmth for a  kitten is always

what she seeks.

 

‘Why kitten,’ I called, ‘has your mother not

come back for you? Has she been struck by

a vehicle as she crossed the road taking

another of her infants to safety? I can’t go

looking for her when your cries ring in my

ear.’

 

So I jump the ditch slipping back more than once

but I reach in – and there you are. Remember how

I made you safe, then: and only then, continued

on my way to school arriving oh so late. Kitten

be thankful you are not a human child who in

such times and circumstances having an explanation

as did not satisfy this hard spinster teacher. Sometimes,

I had been her pet; but not today. O frost, I hope you

are listening. I blamed you. I thought our teacher was so very

crotchety that morning because of you and your early chill.

I remember too that I’d had no warm coat and how when

sitting in front of the stove I’d rather have had your

sweet kitty-kat fur for warmth.

 

Teacher spanked my half-curled fingers and then set me down

in front of the school stove to thaw. Such thawing frost

is cruel – double trouble upon that cold day’s spanking.

 

‘Little kitten, I don’t recall the end of that day or even

if I ever saw you again.’

 

‘Hey frost, I think it is to you I chasten this story every April.

And you go on proving it makes no difference. But if there

is a kitten in need of rescue I could not continue on my way

without a hard word in your ear, be it spring, summer

or early autumn.

 

Frost are you listening; my bones ache today?’

 

Benita Kape 16.4.2019