Category Archives: LoSoRhyMo

Here’s the last of this year’s November verses, uploaded 80 minutes before the midnight deadline:

November verse 14: Graduation
Today is preschool graduation, 
milestone for the almost-fives.
Oh, after long anticipation
3 pm at last arrives 
and soon the graduands are singing
(also jostling, waving, grinning).
One by one they shake the hand 
of Teacher looking mighty grand
and take from her a bag of goodies:
artwork they themselves have made, 
certificate (they've made the grade),
and popcorn. Then, unleash the foodies:
trays of watermelon, grapes and cake,
and cake, and cupcakes, and more cake.

Today I parted with a lot of money. The least I can do is write a rhyme about the reason.

November verse 13: Today I got my hearing aids

They said that I was hard of hearing.
More like soft, the edges dull,
the high notes mostly disappearing,
sibilants all rendered null.
But soft or hard, that’s just pedantic:
friends were cross, sometimes frantic,
tired of shouting to be heard,
repeating every second word.
Today I got two electronic
gizmos, one in either ear,
enabling me at last to hear
what yesterday was ultrasonic.
People have stopped mumbling words
and all my streets are filled with birds.

Not as morbid as you might think:

November verse 12: On a dead goldfish
For Euan
Today we found our last fish floating
lifeless, limp, no longer gold,
a death so tiny, not worth noting.
True though, They shall grow not old.
Flight path fuel dump? Change of season?
Too much sun? Who knows the reason?
This is not Menindee Lakes
where millions died and my heart quakes.
Today I felt a tiny tremor,
rumble from a distant storm,
an inkling that some day the worm
will try my bones, from skull to femur.
May mine be one tiny death,
leave undisturbed the wide world's breath.

Someone needs to write about the wonders of swimming-pool saunas in Sydney’s Inner West. While we’re waiting, here’s my 14 lines’ worth.

November verse 10: In the sauna

Some days we sit and sweat in silence.
Others, it’s as if the heat
dissolves some barrier, gives licence.
Chat can flow and minds can meet,
perhaps with bonhomie and bluster,
pre-cooked jokes, a rant or just a
monologue on weed or booze,
or mild debates about the news.
Tattooed gym-boy, taxi driver,
yia-yia, rap star, tattooed youth,
an old guy with a missing tooth:
all these bodies, like Godiva
almost naked, shoot the breeze,
and no one’s sent to Coventry.

Today’s stanza draws on a passage from Middlemarch in which Ladislaw, whose hair is ‘not immoderately long’, argues the superiority of poetry over painting. The first two lines are almost a direct quote.

November verse 10: Pictures and words
Language gives a fuller image,
all the better as it's vague.
Paintings flaunt their frozen plumage,
stare insistent from the frame
in finished, silent imperfection.
Neither love nor harsh rejection
crease a portrait's botox brow.
No worm forgives the painted plough. 
Life as lived is full of noises
much diviner than what's seen
(or, on occasion, more obscene).
The air resounds with speaking voices:
one picture can delight your eyes, 
a thousand words can make you wise.

For decades newspaper cartoonists have laboured for metaphorical links between the Melbourne Cup and the US election that fell on the same Tuesday in November. This stanza labours a link between astronomical and political.

November verse 6: Eclipse

Here the streets were full of gazers,
faces to the shadowed moon.
No pyrotechnics to amaze us:
cosmic lightshow, gone too soon.
A woman said, 'It's good so many
came outdoors, when there's Sweet Fanny
Adams profit to be made,
just heaven's bodies on parade.'
But over there the lines of voters
braced themselves for Thunderdome 
(though far too many stayed at home).
The climate, SCOTUS, former POTUS:
stakes are high this northern Fall – 
this Tuesday’s poll could doom us all.

This happens every Tuesday, though the musical accompaniment is usually Latin disco rather than Glee.

November verse 5: At the Active Seniors Class

Meek we are, like lambs to slaughter –
not for killing, nor still young.
Lead us on, we say, no quarter,
keep us active, though we're bung.
A back, a knee, a frozen shoulder,
nameless aches from growing older,
long in tooth and short of breath:
we've miles to go before our death.
'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger':
that's the soundtrack as we squat,
lunge, lift weights, tighten cores, get hot
and sweaty. Can we last much longer?
Then it's stretches, brief applause,
and back to life outside those doors