Friday, August 10, 2012

Random Poetry and Cake



Open up a book of poetry and see what you find. Here's mine:

The Cure

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I'm not really asleep 
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bedridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering 
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't do it, put on a red dress.

Ginger Andrews, via Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times

Do it yourself and tell me what you find.

5 comments:

  1. This is a good idea. I'm doing it tomorrow.

    (Your poetry challenge, I mean...not putting on a red dress! Though if I had one lying around I could do that too.)

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  2. What a fab poem! Unknown to me until now!

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  3. I like Aunt Bert's prescription.

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  4. I love this assignment! From Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times:

    The Cry by R.S. Thomas

    Don’t think it was all hate
    That grew there; love grew there, too,
    Climbing by small tendrils where
    The warmth fell from the eyes’ blue

    Flame. Don’t even think the dirt
    And the brute ugliness reigned
    Unchallenged. Among the fields
    Sometimes the spirit, enchained

    So long by the gross flesh, raised
    Suddenly there its wild note of praise.

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