Monday 29 November 2010

The Bus stops here.


Suffer the little children.



Born into Genesis,
raised by the rod.
Threatened with Hellfire,
a cruel, jealous God.

A childhood of guilt
and mindless submission,
pleading with Jesus
for sweet intervention.

I argued my case.
I asked my god why?
He ne’er deigned to answer.
I wanted to die.

So, year after year,
after year of despair,
then realisation:
“There’s nobody there!”

Gods manufactured
by ancients to hold
their people in thrall
and under control,

The god of the cross,
the star and the crescent;
a god of extremists,
terrorists nascent.

So, believe what you want
and say what you must.
I’ve eyeballed your god
And left in disgust.

Poetry bus driven this week by Dana.
Pic borrowed from here.

Saturday 27 November 2010

Blatant Nepotism.

IXL's Gourmet Christmas Pudding.



Overheard at the check out, Gibsons in Noosaville yesterday.

Ist well dressed matron: "Did you pay almost fifty dollars for one pudding!
2nd well dressed matron: "Yes I did, why?"
1st WDM: "I got one yesterday at Colesworths for thirteen fifty!"
2nd WDM: 'Yes I know. But you have to send out a search party to find a currant!"

...........................................................................

Noosa Farmers Market Sunday from 6 am.
Hams, puddings, cakes, tarts (also with non wheat flour).

Thursday 25 November 2010

His cup runneth over its use by date.

The great Will Shakespeare.


1564-1616.
Dramaturge,
Remembered for his plays.

The great Rembrandt.


1606-1669.
Painter.
Remembered for his art.

The great Nellie Melba.


1861-1931.
Soprano.
Remembered through her Edison recordings.

Great Grandpa.


1898-1973.
Hey Alice! Do we really need to keep this cup old what’s-his-face won in some darts competition? It's not as if he was famous or anything!

...........................................

I have my mother's Scrabble set, a few of my father's tools, one or two picture of my grandparents but no record of great-grandparents except names on the family tree! More would be good, even an old trophy would be better than nothing.

Pics from Wiki.
Prompt by Magpie Tales.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

'Sacred Activism'.

Andrew Harvey



On radio today,
I heard such wisdom,
and delusion,
it took my breath away.

He quoted Ghandi,
He quoted Jesus,
He made a call.
(Did not quote me).

‘We waste, we spoil.’
‘We judge, we hate.’
‘But God will save!’
(It's far too late).

'Think or extinct.'
The creator's voice?
'The time has come,
to make your choice!'

Thursday 18 November 2010

Vegas in the Sixties. Magpie 41.

Traminer on ice.













We liked it sweeter then.
Darkened room,
brilliant stage.
When entertainers wore suits.
Sinatra, tie loosened,
cigarette dangling,
in the wee small hours.
When romance
powered our world.

Read more magpie tales here.

Sunday 14 November 2010

Poetry Bus

The other man’s road is
always smoother.









In life I was taking my lumps,
When a fork in the road looked like trumps.
So I made the turn
And too late I learn;
From a distance you can’t see the bumps!

Poetry bus challenge. More poetry here.
Pic borrowed from
here.

Saturday 13 November 2010

'Smokin’ out' Gog and Magog.


It is unimaginable to me that one hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin, the communications explosion and the concept of one humanity inhabiting a global village, we have foreign policy driven by Biblical Prophesy.
'Bush said, when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding.' (The Guardian).
Ronald Reagan believed that 'Gog was code for the USSR', but like all such prophesies, they are vague enough to be applied locally to almost any enemy at any given time.

............................................

Smokin’ out Gog and Magog.

Just now I saw George on TV
Promoting his memoir, you see.
Written by hand,
His own, understand…
But guided by Richard Che-ney.

When asked: ‘Why the war in Iraq?
Why were you so keen to attack?’
He said “Shock and Awe
That’s what we went for
We needed so bad to hit back!”

‘But surely the UN applied
Inspectors to help you decide.
But you went ahead
Despite what they said.
We know your Intelligence lied!’

“Angered and shocked, now I know.”
“But dang it, Hans Blix was too slow!”
“Then Daddy said ‘Son,
Let’s all have some fun.
Let Dick and Don put on a show’.”

So tell me George, what is your creed?
What inspires you? What do you read?
He said, “Nothing new.
The Financial Review
And the Bible is all that I need.”

Pic borrowded from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Thursday 11 November 2010

Magpie 40

Gods.

Legs of a skater
face of a rat
Crown of a king
and tail of a cat.

So was the god
of one ancient race
Now an adornment;
a stylish necklace.



Click here for More magpie tales.

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Architecture of words.

Spelling bee Smartypants.
















I have really had enough!
(Of spelling bees and sim’lar stough).

Some words simply flow, although
Why others don’t I‘ll never knough!

It’s as if a writer’s cough,
Was put there just to slough us ough!

Testing times they put us through;
And perfect scores are very fough.

Not for winners, horse and plough
Easy street for them and hough!

Sitting highest in the borough,
Laughing like a kookaborough.

But here am I, in life’s deep trough
Becoming to-tal-ly pissed ough

And wond’ring if I’ll get my wish
To ask them how they’d spell ‘swordphysche’!

With apologies to Jingle Poetry.
Pic borrowed from
here.

Monday 8 November 2010

Hubris again.

This story exhumed to help Steve Capelin feel better.

Para Bowls in Eden

Sis dragged me there just in time to stop me going totally ga-ga. We had been nursing Mum twenty-four seven for over a year and were worn out. Most days I rode my ninety-nine cc two wheeler to Jen’s house to put in a full day of feeding, toileting, making tea and cooking, washing, making beds and entertaining our darling ninety-three year old stroke destroyed mother, then riding back to Tiziana to be rocked to sleep or battered into wakefulness by extremes of Eden weather.

To get me to meet people, Sis organized a sitter for Mum and booked us in to play indoor bowls at the Sports Club. Althouth I have always loved watching cricket and do appreciate the skill of a good lawn bowler, I had never played bowls. I was a cleanskin.

After introductions, the bustling good humoured woman in charge assigned us to teams. As a newie, I got to bowl second.

Of course, I did all the dumb things like releasing the bowl with the bias on the wrong side, seriously disrupting a game two rinks away, running off the mat and threatening the glass windows at the end of the room, but I did improve and by the third end was keeping the bowl on the mat.

By the fourth and fifth end I was outbowling the lead player in our team, a young woman of maybe forty, fit and confident-looking and began to congratulate myself on my emerging prowess.

At the point in the last end when the 'skip' plays for keeps, the young lady who had been providing the benchmark to which I had aspired, then surpassed, walked out of earshot.

Taking advantage of her absence, the skip leaned over and whispered,
‘She’s not bad for a blind person, is she!’

Pic borrowed from Lawn Bowls Dictionary by Keith Dunstan .

Saturday 6 November 2010

Magpie thirty-nine and a half.

Gang Rape Most Fowl.
(This piece was resurected and dusted off from Wollombi Tales of long ago).

We decided to raise some fowls and bought twenty mixed day-old chicks. But as they grew we realized the mix was nowhere near the fifty-fifty we expected. We had been conned.

Nineteen developed rooster-like features until it was clear we had only one pullet, a ratio of five percent. But we looked on the bright side and planned to dress one a week starting soon. Then our timetable was changed by events beyond our control.

Jim McBeath, my drummer mate and his wife Susan, bought a house at Tascott near Gosford, built a chook pen and populated it with four mature white leghorns hens. All went well until one day that summer, Sue screamed and Jim looked out the window. They were horrified to see a two metre tiger snake slithering across the yard uncomfortably close to their three year old infant. By the time Jim slowed from warp speed at the child’s side, the snake had disappeared under the chook house.

Eric Worrall was alive then, so Jim called him at the Reptile Park and asked what to do. Eric sent a big bearded guy with long hooked length of fencing wire and a chaff bag. After poking around under the shed for ten minutes he had the tiger by the tail, popped him into the bag and offered this advice:

‘You gotta get rid a th’chooks.’

Jim and Sue liked their fowls. Kitchen scraps, transformed into free range eggs, helped feed themselves and four growing boys and they all had names. Fluffy, Muffie, Scruffy and Lucky were loved.

‘Why’s that?’
‘Mate,’ says the expert. ‘Ya got chooks, ya got chook feed. When ya got chook feed ya got rats ‘n where ya got rats ya got snakes. OK?’

At the gig that Friday, Jim asked if I’d take his hens. Our one pullet hadn’t started to lay, so I happily accepted. And so it was that late Sunday night, four comatose birds were tipped gently from a potato sack onto the chook pen floor and I went to bed.

Monday morning, just as the sky was turning from black to streaky grey all hell broke loose. The cacophony of screeching, crowing and two dogs barking propelled me out of bed, heart hammering, to see who or what was being murdered.

It was a brothel in a goldfield. Lined up behind each of the four old virgins were four or five roosters, crowing, scratching, pecking and raping. The hens were terrified as they were spurred into submission, their genetic preconditioning forcing them to squat, wings out to accept their fate-worse-than-death.

The pullet, still too immature for her smell and antics to be attractive, was running around the fence in bewildered terror when I took a hand, grabbed the bag from where I had dropped it in the dark and stuffed the old girls back inside.

While Sal stoked the fire to boil water, I drove two nails into the chopping block to hold their necks still, rounded up all the cockerels except one and lopped off their heads. In ten minutes there were eighteen white rapists hanging by their toes Italian style from the clothes line. From there they were removed one by one, dipped into boiling water, plucking and dressed. All the good bits like hearts, kidneys and gizzards, collectively the giblets, were kept along with the legs for winter broth.

Laying hens live in a coop,
And peacefully sleep on a roost.
Roosters that raid them
Will soon feel the blade then
And end up as somebody’s soup!

Their criminal 'remains', after having been hung, drawn and frozen, were consumed with gusto and sweet revenge over the following months.

More fowl stories can be found at Magpie Tales.

Friday 5 November 2010

A Dooralong Gem. Vale Dot Wightman.

Three Boys

Jack Wightman died about fifteen years ago and the dairy died too. Not that Jack being there was pivotal. On the contrary, in a way, it survived despite him. It was the halving of the price of bulk milk that killed that dairy and hundreds like it.
But the timing was right for Dot. All her children had left home except Kevin, the youngest so she became semi retired and lived off her ‘shop’. Beef cattle replaced the diary herd but she could never stop farming. Odd, considering how progressive she had been as a young woman, she reverted to methods used by her parents and grandparents. I suspect she understood about carbon footprints long before anyone uttered that phrase. She was smart and she was wise and she walked the walk

Around the house, that had no hot water, no kitchen sink and no water supply except one old steel tank, she grew her veggies and bred her ducks, chooks and the occasional turkey. Duck eggs and fowl eggs were placed under bantam mothers to hatch, because ‘bantams make the best mothers’ so around the yard wandered a motley mixture of species that seemed happily unaware they were being manipulated by the wily old woman who fed them. She was a true farmer who understood her animals and plants like nobody I knew.

Born in the farmhouse, she grew up there and took over the main role when her father died, buying a Grey Ferguson tractor in 1947, probably the first in the valley. When she went to high school, Jack was the school bus driver and Dot was his passenger. Some in the community never fully forgave him for marrying Dot, much younger, pretty as a picture and heir to the property. They said the roles were reversed when he moved in. He became the passenger.
But Jack, whatever some thought of him, helped her to the end. I say helped, because Dot was always the boss.

Her children, all five were bright and some super bright like Heather who studied mathematics and became a computer whiz and trouble shooter for BHP. But before she became too busy, she worked for me.
I met Dot at a community meeting where in those days she seemed to be the secretary of everything and asked if she knew any kids interested in zucchini picking, so she sent me Heather. Heather was not only a top student, she was a top worker as were all Dot’s children and every one of them worked for me at one time or another except John the eldest who I didn’t meet until his mother’s funeral a few weeks ago.

A couple of acres of zucchinis is easy to plant but takes a lot of picking and needs picking every day, so I asked the kids to see if they could find some more pickers. Next day, Kevin, Dot’s youngest turned up with two mates so I put each newcomer with an older person to learn the ropes and we got on with it.

After a while, I sensed something was wrong and looked up to see one lad throw a zucchini at another, so I warned him. All seemed to go well for a while until I found another of the three hiding in the vines and lobbing some big ones at another kid then all three started an all out war with my precious Zucchinis as ammunition.

I had no option but to send them home. Just as they walked off Jack and Dot strolled onto the paddock. They stopped for a minute to watch Kevin leaving with the other kids then came on to where I was working.
‘Nearly finished?’ asked Jack.
I looked across the paddock at the acres yet to be picked.
‘No mate, nowhere near finished, but I had to send the boys home.’
‘What happened?’ asked Dot.
‘They were throwing fruit at each other. I warned them a couple of times, but they kept buggerisin' around, so I had to send them home. Sorry.’

Jack was silent for a moment. He took a long look at the departing boys, still pushing each other, laughing and playing as they went, then turned back and offered me this little gem.

‘You know, if yer get a boy, yer got a boy. If yer get two boys, yer got half a boy and if yer get three boys, yer got no boys at all!’

Pic borrowed from here.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Magpie Rooster 39

.
Manners Maketh the Chook.
















Chanticleer, the rooster tall
Saw some spiders on the wall.
Said he, “Bonjour
Nice day for sure!”
Gave me a wink, then ate them all!

See more sensible contributions at Magpie tales.

Monday 1 November 2010

Masquerade

Writers Scilly Island.










‘Eek!’ Said the beautiful maid
‘By eye make-up, I’ve been betrayed!
I must confess
My face is a mess!’
So I gave her my Mascara-aid.







Can I start again?

See some better Writer's Island posts here.
Pic borrowed from here.