Enheduanna's Daughter

Something To Do While Watching the News
I think, when we see the news on TV, it’s easy to go into horror and woe.
But there is danger adding anger to anger, letting fear and hate proliferate.
Remember – we increase both Love and Peace in the Universe, not by making things worse
but rather by being those qualities: seeing, in our minds eye, how they fill us – and now
projecting them as light in intentional flight to the war-torn places, the tormented faces.
Excuse if I preach. I do think that each ray from each soul adds to the whole –
perhaps infinitesimally, yet surely exponentially? I can only start with me. So can you. Oh, may it be!


I was recently given a challenge to write truthfully, without 'artistic imagination', while using rhyme. Poets United's Midweek Motif ~ Televised finally gave me an occasion to try it.

I Don’t Sew

It didn’t come naturally. Girls at my High School had to learn it (and cooking) in first year; boys woodwork. Aptitude was not a criterion.
My stitches were large, uneven, crooked, sometimes stained (inky fingers).
I was always in trouble, having to unpick and do things over. It took ages of homework time. My parents were concerned; it took time from academic studies.
Mum sat down with me one night, said, ‘Watch me,’ and very slowly did the first four stitches of my homework hem on a square of cotton meant for a handkerchief. I had brought the same thing home night after night to unpick and repeat.
She explained how she inserted the needle close to the edge of the hem, made the stitch tiny, kept them the same distance apart, slanted them in the same direction. I went all the rest of the way along the hem, using her first four as a guide. It was painstakingly slow.
Next day, I showed the sewing teacher.
‘YOU did this all by yourself?’
‘Mummy helped me,’ I admitted. She erupted, ho…

I Miss the Best Bits, Though

as the bus careens downhill somewhere between Inverell and Grafton, quicker than my camera can click – a tree with a bulbous trunk as if it grew in the outback; a bare, domed rock half the height of the tree it stands beside; a sudden bank of crags.
We have time to see, though I don’t snap, the wallaby bodies beside the road. It’s not that car drivers hit them, so much as they who hit the cars – ancient beings without road sense not needed when this continent and its creatures formed.
Now we move very slowly between thick banks of spindly trees on a one-vehicle-wide descent. It’s long. Police let a line of cars, going north or south, traverse in turn. We crawl, then finally gather speed. I miss a startling gully, deep, amongst the surrounding trees on level ground.
************
Later, back home, I discard lots of blurry shots. I notice I haven’t kept any showing a river shrunk to mud puddles after the years of drought. I wanted viewers to see and know – but after all my quick snaps co…

Birthing Perfume (the scent of the frangipani)
Suddenly I see, my frangipani – which has grown wide and high in my nine years living here and claiming I have any right of ownership – startlingly appears, the first time I’ve seen (else I’m unawares) to have sprouted a giant phallic symb- ol. But quite the opposite: it’s a womb! It’s a great, hardly-ever-happens pod full of new seeds, high up on a limb.… New trees, heaven-scented, will rise to God.

Written for Poets United's Midweek Motif ~ Perfume. Frangipani (plumeria) flowers have one of my favourite scents, and at present the winter bareness of mine reveals this new development, so weird and surprising that I Googled it and made the discovery I write of above. 
As I'm a guest presenter at dVerse over the next few weeks, featuring Poetry Form: Dizain, I decided to write this poem in that form. I always thought the dizain came easily to me – not this time, lol! But I hope the eccentricities of this piece are at least interesting. Perhaps …