For yesterday’s haiku, I eventually came up with:

Tufts of beige hair
drift by warm eggs,
bird scolding dog.

Today’s prompt was to write something work-related. I am in fact still at the office, having begun this after I clocked out at 8:27 p.m.:

Calling

I forget if it was a priest or a parishioner
who years ago declared, “God collars those
who He doesn’t want loose on the streets”
as we stood in the Christ Church lobby
discussing div school dropouts.

I am not among them, for all these years
I have known I am not a minister. My gifts
correspond to spreadsheets, manuals,
and casting commas upon wordy waters.
Nor can I ignore how my IQ drops fifty points
whenever I’m face to face with a phone —
instant disqualification for a pastor. It’s not

a source of grief or dismay, though now and then
I covet the parking spaces, the gowns and stoles,
the being needed, and the being deserving
of being so needed, just as I sometimes dream
of gold statuettes and thanking the Academy
even though I don’t write screenplays
and the last time I pretended to be someone else
was in an Ionesco play my last year of college.
I do pretend to be more patient and kind
and content than I actually am, to honor
how fortunate I’ve been: I can’t help my hangups
but ingratitude is not only a sin, it’s a bore
and if I am indeed a creature in His image —
well, I refuse to believe in a God who pouts
or whinges about the messes one could claim
are of His making, nor do I despise
those who cannot bear to believe
in any god, given the cruelties
exercised in His name. Yet, even so,
all that I fold and file in the name of order,
all that I devise for comfort, all that I do
to harvest praise or love — “work”
is what I call my obligations to the possible,
and what is “the possible” but another name for God?

– pld

(As it happens, I do have a sermon to deliver this Sunday, so that’s what I plan to work on when I get home. And the late shift here is admittedly partly due to me taking an extra-long lunch, the better to murder a major (and majorly stubborn) darling in the short story that’s been hijacking my head.)

The PAD prompt for day 11 was to write about an object or objects. I’d seen a large man on Rue de Chartres that morning carrying a small pair of pale blue polyester bunny ears, and have been trying to make a poem out of that, but this is what I finally came up with instead:

Objectif-iced

Nostalgic for bouncier times, Flora builds
a trio of snow-women, each with jellybean nipples.
One she crowns with a shiny headband
with pale blue polyester bunny-ears.
On the one to its left, she drapes thirteen strands
of green, gold, and purple plastic beads.
And on the third, she shapes a tentacle,
plump and curving from hip to belly,
and as she pats and squeezes its tip
she could swear the precipitate on her fingers
smells like salt.

Yesterday’s prompt was to write about rebirth:

Journey

Once the hem of a petticoat,
now the wrapper of a waffle cone.
Tomorrow a postage stamp.

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Today’s prompt is to write a haiku — and/or an anti-haiku. I’m going to think about it in the shower. In the meantime, there’s Things Japanese in Tennessee, which has a poetry section (for ages ten and up) with pieces by Joanne and me, as well as luminaries such as marlene mountain and Sydney Bougy…