A nasty nursery rhyme
August 3, 2021
Diddle diddle cumquat gnomes on the porch eating all the fairies with a golden fork See thirteen budgies aviary all full? screaming at a guinea pig red flag to wee bull Poets are itching itching with an itch one is a rhymer one is not so rich Gnomes are coming cumquat diddle dum hungry for eyeballs now they’ll have some fun! PS Cottier
I seem to be writing a lot of fantasy lately, probably as an escape from the exigencies of editing. Just had another very little thing published at the venerable AntipodeanSF. A scifaiku, the first of a few to come.
Tuesday poem: Glassy eyed
March 21, 2016
Glassy eyed
She wraps herself in air, mere
scent and breeze and rumour,
and perches on the nearest branch
to hear the evening’s chat.
Invisible, except when the youngest child,
not quite doomed to prose,
holds a kaleidoscope to open window,
bored with the inexplicable gush
that parents call a conversation —
a strange animal dressed in beige
that sometimes flares to angry orange.
And amongst the leaves of glassy,
clipped punctuation, caught in a cylinder
of found poetry, the girl sees a pellucid
curve, bending towards the house,
and knows it to be outside the scope
of parental chat or cunning toy.
A shimmering crescent perched
between the eucalyptus leaves,
the eager figure bends towards the hum,
a stingless bee, muted hint of dragonfly.
Shaking her toy and her mousy hair,
the girl turns away, back to the easy
world of solids, and lumpy certainty.
Outside, a quiet sigh augments the wind,
and gossamer wings unfurl to flight.
P.S. Cottier
You can’t have too many fairy poems, in my opinion. Well you probably can, but I quite like this; and it’s nice not to always be writing angry poems about politics or climate change or mass extinctions.
Are fairies an endangered species? Discuss in two thousand words or fewer.
PS Cottier 