It’s November already.
In the middle of moving house, I’m currently in South Australia to celebrate a sister’s 70th birthday and a niece’s 30th, with any number of other siren calls on my attention. But November is LoSoRhyMo (Local Sonnet Rhyming Month), and I am obliged to produce 14 x 14-line poems over these 30 days. Rhyming is essential and quantity matters more than quality. (The fact that I’m the sole LoSoRhyMo-ist doesn’t render the obligation any less binding.) So here goes:
The Second of November: Memories of a Catholic childhood
On All Souls’ Day, each church visit
sets a suffering sinner free
from Purgatory. How could we miss it?
Duck inside and bend a knee,
Our Father, then a Hail and Glory
Be, and out. Repeat the story.
Girls held hankies to their hair.
No time to sit and think and stare.
Yet this cuckoo-clock palaver
held coding from a long-gone day
like amber that traps DNA.
Now I learn from calaveras
that those acts then, inside my head,
built friendly shrines to all my dead.
Me fail? I fly! 
Thinking of your beautiful Innisfail church on the hill! Being reminded by contrast of the dour plainness of my Tamworth Seventh-day Adventist faith and church – no friendly shrines – but lines of hymns and Bible verses that spring to life still to-day – given the prompt from random sparks!
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Thanks Jim. That is indeed the church I was remembering. And I’m glad my truncated verse strikes a chord
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Thanks Jonathan – love the cuckoo palaver/trapped in amber imagery! I was reminded by Ecuadorian Spanish teacher about how they see the day as remembering those they love and by doing so, making them live on. xx
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Thanks Deb. One good thing about the 14-line form is that you can’t put everything in , so you inevitably get less wrong, and I’m sure if I’d gone on to actually name the Día de Muertos I would have made an idiot of myself!
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