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.

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…

This week’s painting-prompt at Fifty Two Pieces is Gregory Grenon’s Moth Girl. I couldn’t help but think of it in tandem with Lesley Dill’s Standing Man with Radiating Words:

Restless

It’s after midnight, the weekday just
a few hours ahead. The lamps should be off,
the piano lid closed, the curtains drawn,
the clothes in their hampers or on their hangers,
the laptop powered off. It is not the hour
for fingers on keyboards. But none of the manuals
have chapters on getting to sleep when wings
insist on emerging from our shoulderblades. When
we don’t know how to arrange the blankets
in ways that won’t crease our panache beyond repair
or ding the edges of the letters depending upon
both to give them weight and give them flight. There
is nothing to be done except to continue fumbling
through the almost-silence for whatever semblance
of almost-repose one can retrieve from the shadows:
Martha runs through “Greensleeves” first as a boogie
and then as the blues. Across the room,
Isaac holds a “g” too close, like an umbrella
he will refuse to unfurl even when the rain
showers down as a thousand tiny nails,
glittering to the sight but dull to the ear.
It’s not an hour for sunlight: Martha moves on
to a tune I don’t know, but it’s thick with smoke
and the one drink too many that spells the abyss
between a drunken nap and sleepless sorrow.
It’s a song that’s good company for the self-forlorn:
the letters on Isaac’s back droop into drowsy folds,
and I drift into slumber as Martha eases the song to its end.

– pld