Word Garden Word List---Life After Life

 

Hello my little repeat offenders! Welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt! This time our List is taken from Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, in which a woman is born and reborn again and again, in different situations but with recurring threads. 

The main question of the novel is, will she grow up (she frequently dies in childhood) and assassinate Adolph Hitler before he comes to power in Germany? It's a fascinating read. One thing I especially liked was that she experiences life on both sides of the second world war. 

Will she kill Hitler and save the world from global catastrophe? Read it and find out. Meanwhile, what we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. (It need have nothing to do with the source material unless you want it to.) Then just link, visit others, and then sit back to contemplate your mission in life. This prompt is current through Sunday, so don't forget to come back to visit the late-bloomers; they've been looking a little droopy for lack of comments. 😔

And now, your List!

announced

creature

doll

doves

drivel

extravagant

foxes

gusto

henhouse

jam

kissed

laundry

makeshift

nanny

narrow

pillows

rugs

skeleton

token

train

A Vagabond Hour

 

It was just an afternoon in a blur of afternoons

scattered in a line like a row of troll dolls.

Where is the screen porch where we played

when an hour was long and a year eternity?

Where are the mud pies we put in tins?

Where are those houses, those girls, that summer?

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned. 

On a steel rack at the foot of the basement stairs

was a parade of winter coats in plastic sheaths

crowned brightly by hat boxes across the top.

One yellow box had a silhouetted carriage on the lid

and we swooned at the idea of suitors arriving 

as we stood tip-toe on a fold-out stool, snooping.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

Best friends, families, afternoons, troll dolls

all scatter, our solid center become fragile 

bric-a-brac. Today a package came, and in it

a yellow hat box, and in the hat box, the scent

of my late aunt's house, my childhood, and an afternoon

in summer 1966, perfectly preserved and vivid.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

________

for Dverse MTB: Boxing Clever to The Bop.

One day I received a package containing a book (which I changed to a hat box in the poem). The book was inside a plastic sleeve, and when I took it out and opened it, I was instantly back in my aunt's house as a child. I think the book had been kept at some time on a shelf where someone had used the same furniture polish as my aunt used. In any event, I buried my smiling face in the pages and breathed in that long-forgotten scent.  As for the troll dolls, mudpies, screen porches and coat rack with the yellow hat box on top, that was all stuff that I remember from childhood.

Image at top found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Grateful Dead Box of Rain

A Divorce, 2001

 

I don't miss the arguments

or the madness,

the steady harsh hum of discord.

I don't miss hearing the dogs' toenails 

digging against the wood floor

as their sheltered world turned ugly.

I don't miss the eerie sound of

empty accusations

demanding confession of phantom sins.

I don't miss the sound of our son

begging you to stop smashing dishes

when I tried to escape to the bath.

I don't miss the slick drone of lawyers

or the jangle of keys to

homes changing hands. 

But when I sat down to eat

at the same table in a different kitchen

with the windows December-dark,

the silence wool-thick

and the opposite chair mute and empty,

I almost couldn't bear it--

almost couldn't face

the long wait for spring.

______

for What's Going On? -- "Silence"

Note: my divorce set me free, but at the time it was awful. I don't think I've ever written about it quite so baldly before. 

Don't forget, the Word Garden Word List is still active through Sunday!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot if There's a Reason

Word Garden Word List--Our Man In Havana

 

Graham Greene

Hello my little expats, and welcome to this week's Word List! This week, our source is a novel that author Graham Greene called one of his "entertainments" in which a vacuum cleaner salesman is somehow drafted as an operative in Cuba and makes his reports based on a volume of Tales From Shakespeare and describes non-existent military installations by modeling them after vacuum cleaner assembly plans. 

The book is a hoot and one of my favorites. Greene is better known for his excellent and much more serious novel The End of the Affair among many, many others. This prompt remains current through Sunday. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then prowl the bars of Havana while wearing a funny nose and eyeglasses disguise!

And now, your List:

bamboozled

cinema

cold

convent

dogs

experiments

fever

finesse

fling

futile

half-heartedly

Havana

lucid

nowadays

pills

pilots

remedy

slang

volume

waiter

Palomas Perdidas

"How different it all was from what you'd planned." --F Scott Fitzgerald

 Here's the thing about love--

you can't finesse it for long once it's

worn away

                      like a river stone,

lost in the mail,

the ring gone down the trap.

Oh, you're right, it doesn't stay

cinema big-screen hothouse bloomed

the way it

                   starts out,

all fever-fine experiments in joy.

Just because you get lucid in the drowse of time,

doesn't mean call the hearse,

cut the roses,

ask the waiter for something mild and bland

like some blue hair breakdown of the heart.

No.

When we reduced, though, in the long shadow of years

to a shorthand slang for what used to be

a poem written

                                 with the soul-vase of our bodies,

we became pilots in a sky without any gardens below.

I'm sorry, you know? I envy the old dog still loved,

still a sunrise in someone's eyes,

or to be the one with a candescent heart as fine

as old art,

                    stars forever swirling over lamplit groves.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Our Man In Havana

Palomas Perdidas "Lost Doves"

Music: Concrete Blonde Mexican Moon

On Set Mishap 1928

 

I, Guinivere Golde, aspiring megastar and idol of millions,

was performing in Pharaoh and the Flapper, when the wildcat

I held

on a leash

suddenly and deliberately

questioned my method and acting choices. 

Clawed to ribbons and near death

(but still achingly beautiful and scandalously erotic)

I was loaded into the world's slowest ambulance

which was 

driven by

the studio head who was wearing a chauffeur's cap

and already having me written out the role I had given it up to get.

Does that sound fair to you? Does it?

So there I was, riding in the back with the EMT

(played to great effect by Basil MacNaughton-Redfield)

and also the offending puma, who had donned a tux,

answering questions

as the EMT

did a background and got my vitals, for which I am usually

compensated well beyond scale, but this fool wanted freebies. 

Prefacing all of my responses with "survey says..." and 

fluttering my lashes as if I had some kind of coquettish palsy,

I saw lights, smelled oranges, and heard bells as we sped on.

"Hospital admin says,

every time a bell rings

an EMT gets into med school."

Thus spake my healing angel as the puma looked on impassively.

I hate it when my rescuer--and there always is one--goes off script.

Then I coded, dying like a regular Carmen in my juiciest role ever.

A girl anticipates things like this, living in a rented shoebox,

living on saltines and gin, and sleeping in a murphy bed,

but now,

O Happy Day!

it was my death scene!

My name made all the trades and my wedding to the EMT was

covered coast to coast and broadcast breathlessly on radio.

The three of us (with the puma) then staged a gala funeral on the beach!

So you see, I'm a star. 

Oh honey, you're not getting me into those ratty wings.

Who designed them, that ark guy?

Where's the phone, I need to call my agent.

(No reporters? Some tw0-bit burg this is.)

How long will I have to stay here?

I'd kill for a smoke and a publicist right about now.

Criminy. 

So this is Heaven huh?

What a dump!

______

for Word Garden Word List--13 Reasons Why. 

Music: The Hebbe Sisters It Don't Mean a Thing

Word Garden Word List--Thirteen Reasons Why

 Hello my angsty cherubs, and welcome to this week's Word List! This week our source is Jay Asher's novel Thirteen Reasons Why. It's one of my all-time favorites. A teenage girl commits suicide, but before she does, she makes a series of tapes explaining what made her lose hope. 

It's since been made into a Netflix series which I have not seen, but maybe you have.  The book and series generated a certain amount of controversy, with some saying the story does more harm than good. I disagree, based solely on the novel. It does a superb job of showing how casual and seemingly minor words and actions can have a terrible impact on someone, and are really not minor at all, especially to a young person. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then go down to the cafeteria and enjoy some mystery meat with a prohibited sugary soda. I'll already be there. Cheers!

Your list:

ambulance

anticipates

bamboo

beautiful

bell

camera

cat

coins

happy

joking

juicy

machines

menu

movie

peacock

random

shoebox

slowest

survey

textbook