Real Toads: Mary's challenge: points of view

It's bigger than
"I say potato, you say potahto"
in the little house on the corner.
It's two different mindsets,
attempting cohabitation,
but butting heads daily.

One sees work to be started,
the other sees work to be postponed.
One sees the finished product,
the other sees something to be endured.

© Kay Davies photo

 
Nevertheless,
opposites attract.
When one is away,
the other is lonely.
Just as with cats:
butting the other with one's head
means "I love you."
 
*
Posted for Mary's Mixed Bag at the online writers' group Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

For Real Toads, with Mary: ordinary things

the dishwasher

sounds like

mom’s old wringer washing machine

water sloshing

back and forth

back and forth

back and forth.

we usually turn the dishwasher on

at bedtime

and it soothes me to sleep

with memories

of childhood.

I put the dishwasher on this morning,

and it's making me

sleepy, like a child

hearing a lullaby.

Today, for Mary's Mixed Bag at the writers' group Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Mary shared the poetry of Stuart Dischell, who wrote Thin Song of the Leaky Faucet, as well as As I Dispose of an Old Encyclopedia.

Our challenge is to write a poem about an everyday thing. The everyday thing I've chosen is our dishwasher, which brings back memories of the laundry machine of my childhood.

For Real Toads: New Year challenge

Mary has a new challenge—Mary’s Mixed Bag—for the writers’ group Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, and for her first Friday, which is the last Friday of the year, she has chosen “Ring out the old, ring in the new” from the poem In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).

Two of Tennyson’s lines called out to me:

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

I’ve written a little verse in no particular style, with these timely subjects in mind. I have found that life, in the final analysis, is made more satisfying by offering people a helping hand.

Everyone has something to offer to someone, be it helping with crises in places like Kenya, to which my blogging friend Joyful devotes much of her time, or just helping your neighbor. We have a neighbor who brings his snowblower over now and then, and when I thanked him the first time, he said he wanted it to be "anonymous snowblowing" but it's a little difficult to disguise the sound!

As Tennyson's poem continues:
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land

Here, then, is my submission to Mary's first Mixed Bag prompt.

www.antiqueclipart.com

out with the old, and in with the new,

I'll have a new job and a new house, too.

I’ve worked so hard and I’ve saved so much

my friends all worry I’m out of touch.

but I’m not gone, I’m not on the shelf,

I’ve just reached the goal I set myself:

a cute little house with a basement flat

(big help with the mortgage, I thought of that)

and work in a field that’s more fulfilling,

in a help-others job, I’m more than willing!




I am also linking this to the meme Weekend Writers' Retreat at the blog Grandma's Goulash.