It's Still Life

It was shortly after I broke my bedroom window with a baseball, which by the way wasn’t my fault, my little sister threw like a girl and I swung a bat like a boy, and it wasn’t my fault that she didn’t catch the ball when I threw it back a tiny bit too hard when that ball nearly hit me in the head. I mean it wasn’t my fault that she threw like a girl and couldn’t catch. Mum took our ball and bat away, and told us to find a more girlie game to play, which is what you were expected to do in the 1950s, so we said Yes, Mum, and then rode our bikes to the woods about 5 miles away, and caught crayfish with our bare hands. Bagged them up for the neighbour’s cat to eat. We loitered around the creek, splashed about, and ate blackberries and stained our fingers with their ripeness. In no rush to do anything, until the sun started to set. And then we slowly headed back home. Those were the days, when Khrushchev banged his shoes on the table, the telly was never turned on until after dinner, and we kids played outside, pushed our limits, fell out of trees and broke bits of ourselves – but we always healed, that’s what we learned. Get up. Dust yourself off. You’ll always heal.

Blue dragonflies float
On the breath of simple sheep.
I wrote a letter home

AprPAD Day 16 and 17

It’s National Poetry Writing Month, which explains the surge in activity. I’m following three different sites generating daily prompts. Writers’ Digest Poetic Asides, the National Poetry Writing Month website (NaPoWriMo) and my old friend, Walt, over at Gnomes. All of these pieces are drafts.