Rollicking good time at the Coffeeshop Writers' Group - Two poems: Missing Blueberries and Death at Dawn

Okay, we've got three fine writers who brought in copies of their work.

Linda brought in THE GAZEBO, a fictionalized account of a support group called New Directions which she wrote with galloping good humor. Since I'd already critiqued the story online, I got up and went for a walk around the store, ogling all the delicious things I was not going to eat.

  Pudding most of all.

Pudding is a popular treat at our table. Think a moment, Dear Reader, and tell me what ingredient makes all the other ingredients gel together.

I think I'll pose that Q to Scott when I see him at 6 for PIZZA NIGHT!

Our fabulous writers did not know the answer. Neither did Scott.

The answer will appear below in my poem "Death Watch."



Carly wrote a lovely piece we smashed to smithereens.

Entitled "All About the Dream," it was exquisitely wrin. Here's the first graf

He was slinking out of sight in the chill of the night air. At the same time I turned out my headlights that revealed his big ears and that paunch he stroked with such loving care.

We were unanimous in our desire to have it take place in the real world, not in a dream. Only Frank Baum can get away with that. 

*


Martha in the tangerine-colored top recently had a procedure in the hospital.

She wrote two poems about it:

"In the Operating Room" portrayed a vivid picture of "going under" while the "Girl's Club" watched over her.... and then waking up and seeing these "angels" again.

One of her lines mentioned that a nurse asked her questions, while she was falling asleep, and it made her sound "interesting" - like someone she'd like to know.

"Is This How Death Is?" had her going over to the other side. She had watched her father die and saw how easy death was.



Here I must insert a note about why I was up until 4 am last nite. Well, certainly, I had a lot of coffee, but I was ultra-stimulated by a documentary made by the recently deceased British fantasy writer, Sir Terry Pratchett. He died at age 66 after being diagnosed at 62 with an unusual variety of Alzheimer's diz.



He produced the documentary in order to learn about assisted suicide. It is not legal in the UK so you must go to the "mainland" of Europe.

One option is to use the services of Dignitas in Zurich, Switzerland. Assisted suicide is performed there. Very carefully. There are numerous failsafes to ensure the patient is in his right mind and is not depressed and not feeling coerced.

While in England, Prachett visits two men:
Young Andrew, an unmarried man of about 42, who is so crippled by MS, he wishes to die.

He is a lovely man and you'll meet him if you view the video here. 

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. 

Peter is another man who chooses to die. He is in his early 70s and has a rare motor neuron disease. Like Andrew, he chooses to die in Zurich.

We watch Peter in the small house in Zurich where the deaths take place. He is ready! His wife is not, begs him to wait until Xmas, but he cannot. He knows that if he waits too long his hands may not be able to hold the poison that will kill him.

We watch him sit on a long comfortable bench in between his wife and the female aide. 

He drinks the two drafts, falls into a deep sleep including snoring, as his wife massages his hand and thigh, and the Dignitas aide lovingly takes Peter in her arms as he struggles and chokes a bit, eyes closed, and then falls into the deep sleep leading to death.

I think it takes about 6 minutes.

How did I discover this video?

From my friend Marcy, who is one of my main reviewers of my prose and poetry. She told me she'd review my new poem after she finished watching this hour-long video. I did not want it to end.

Then, while on the subject of death, I introduced Marcy to an article I was reading in Vanity Fair by Dominick Dunne, whose daughter was murdered by her jealous BF. So suspenseful. See assortment of the late Mr Dunne's stories here.

Allan Heller was there in fine form, cracking us all up with his jokes n puns. His short story "Bulls Eye" was hilarious, tracing the history of archery and it's use in war.

Oh! Allan, since you said you wanted a new clipboard, I put one of my three into the blue bag I allus carry to the writers group. If I notate, I follow up.

The advent of the bow and arrow revolutionized warfare. The Western World owes a great debt to a little known Roman soldier, Davidicus Marcus Grammicus Bacchus Atticus - known to his friends as "Dave."

Since Allan didn't bring enough copies for all - 6 - we had to share.


"I'm not sharing my hymnal with anybody!" said quick-witted Floyd B Johnson.

Floyd had emailed one of his delightful short prose pieces, "The Disappearance of Bill Hall."

Bill had a great job, a lovely family, and everything a man would want. Why had he disappeared?

He'd fallen for a woman. And refused to talk to his wife about it. There was no way he was coming back. Stubborn. He had made up his mind.

Loved the piece! Reminds me of The Moon and Sixpence about Paul Gauguin's decision to leave the financial world of London and move to the South Seas to paint. His wife could badger him all she wants, but he's not coming back.

Beatriz is a strong woman, going on 82. She gets chemo and is doing quite well. However, she gets exhausted and left early. She rested near the hearth to gather up her strength before going out in the gentle rain and driving home.

We learned more about wasps and honey bees in her latest essay. Flowers and pollinators co-evolved... doing a kind of dance, a give and take, where one slight improvement - such as the development of two stomachs in the wasp - was accomplished by another development in the flower.

Like a loving marriage that evolves over the centuries.


What's different about Donna today?

I give up. "It's my hair," she said. "She got a few inches cut off."

LADY is the title of her poem about a female Mastiff who is about three feet tall.



Lady "digs her owner"
a proud Mastiff

She paints a beautiful visual picture and then surprises us with the sad news that Lady has passed away from kidney failure.

But of course, in Donna's eyes, there's an afterlife.

 
 In fact, here's a special edition of Jesus and The Afterlife just in time for Easter.

I picked this up to look at and photograf while Linda was reading to the group.

Here are some other b'ful photos


Wow!
Just Wow!!!

Am wearing my Penguin sweater I bought in NOLA. It's a cold damp day.
 Dank! what does that mean?

I knew I was gonna write a poem about my Robert Frost book. See below. Also, when I woke up early this morning after falling asleep to the fascinating video on C-Span about African-Americans Passing as White, it was nigh onto 6 am. I saw the refreshing light of dawn from my high-up window over the red couch in the living room.

That, I said about the Sun, must go into my next poem.

I'm gonna revise these but am E X H A U S T E D  and ask your pardon for going to bed before 8 o'clock, Wee Willie Winkie. 

MISSING BLUEBERRIES

You wouldn’t happen to know

a Miss Regina Ziegler would you?

I’ve been studying her handwriting

to figure out her first name,

I’m no cryptographer so

can’t rightly tell if it’s Regina

or Rina, but it’s a mighty regal

“R” she writes, with the sureness

of a woman who loves poetry and

may indeed write some herself.

It was Miss Regina, as I’ll call her,

who once owned my sole

book of poetry by Robert Frost,

the cover of which states

“The Pocket Book of

Robert Frost’s Poems.”

Leave it to me to check where

apostrophes go. They ought to

get it right, don’t you think,

the editors, all dead now, I’d imagine,

as is the poet himself.

Regina herself met a terrible end

and not meaning to keep you in

suspense, bear with me a little while

as I prattle on.

With a number two pencil

Miss Regina has lightly

underlined some phrases,

not many; like me, she probably

doesn’t believe in marring a book.

“Plain language and lack of

rhetoric,” is where her pencil

first touched the book. Then a

lapse of fifty pages until

pencil, resting in her mouth,

dared come down again

“For to be social, is to be

forgiving.”

And there we have it. But

half a dozen phrases underlined,

Miss Regina, a spinster school marm who

taught in the one-room school house,

a converted barn with only eleven

children, from blue-eyed Mary nearing

pubescence, to tough Frankie who

begged his daddy "Let me go and
learn instead of mowing hay and

minding the cows."

These were the children she never had.

Did she read them Frost? You bet she

did. They loved the one about the blueberries

“as big as the end of your thumb, real sky-blue and

ready to drum in the cavernous pail of the first

one to come!”

And that goodly Miss Regina had brought silver buckets

of blueberries and passed them around after class with

another bucket of cold milk she brought from a neighboring

farm. There were farms in those days. More than

you can count. Just like there are shops today

teetering on what used to be farm fields.

She also read them a few about the stars up above

in Heaven. Where we would all go when life has had

enough of us. The eleven children made sure they

wished upon a star every night, their little heads

pointed upward, hands clasped together in prayer

as their eyes skipped merrily across the sky.

Were those owls they heard hooting in the distance?

Was that the sounds of their families inside the

shut doors and windows? She introduced them to the wonders

of the world. Would it ever leave them? On their

death beds would they think, “It’s been a wonderful

life?”

One winter it was too cold to walk the deep snow

to get to school. Miss Regina turned on her coal stove,

glanced at the glowing coals burning as orange as the 
put-up marmalade,warmed her shivering hands and went back to

bed to keep herself warm. She heard the explosion

a sound like a million church bells going off

at once.

Was that her last thought as she catapulted, quilts

and nightgown and all, from her straw mattress, floating up

up up in the air

like a bread rising in the oven?

Oh, they would miss her all right.

And I will miss her most of all for it’s

time to mourn her once again,

to think of Miss Regina and

eat some blueberry yogurt

in her memory. I like the kind

where the cream rises to the top.

DEATH AT DAWN

For someone condemned to death

I was surprised at how well I slept

a deep dreamless sleep

smooth as Mama’s cornstarch pudding

Caught hiding under a bridge

in the Shenandoah Valley of

sweet-smelling Virginia

they dragged me to the

one-room hut where

military justice was served

Traitor. A name that will

follow my family throughout

the generations. My uniform

ripped from my body and

forced to wear a thin stinking

uniform of lousy stripes even

though I loved the stripes of

the red, white and blue

A traitor down through the ages.

I awakened on my straw mattress

stretched and remembered where I was

saw through the high-up window

the kindness of the light of the sun.

Suddenly my heart beamed and I

shouted out loud “hallelujah!”

I whispered these words as

they dragged me out

pushed me against the wall

when the hood went on

I saw Mama’s tearful face

Lucille’s golden curls

and felt my bowels loosen.

Mama, Lucille,

hallelujah

hallelujah.