Count our words for Mama Zen

Over at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Mama Zen has asked us to write about, for, or with the number 8.
Because words really count with Mama Zen, she asks us not to use more than 80 of them per poem.
I wrote what I thought would surely be fewer than 80 words, and it came out to 91. Just a stroke of luck that removing two lines made it 80.

words that count with mama zen

won’t go up to nine or ten

what she wants today is eight

eight or eighty, not eighty-eight

the thing about eight that’s really great

is: lots of words will rhyme with eight

I can write them on my slate

Wikimedia photo, Portugal,

by Adam Jones, Kelowna, BC

or else pile them on my plate

my appetite I soon will sate

if I just think of number eight

let’s go swinging on the gate

or stuff the cats into a crate!

Wikimedia photo of unmanned level crossing, linking Silt Road to Badgeney End, UK.

Photographer Stan Wray recalls hurting his head on this gate when swinging on it as a child.