I've been reading Omar Khayyam this week (or Edward Fitzgerald channeling Omar Khayyam) and noticing how well his carpe diem attitude describes my daily life. I mean, just look at his most memorable lines:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Make a few minor substitutions and here's my day in a nutshell:
An iPod singing verses in my ear,
An IV drip, hospital food--and there
I sit absorbing chemotherapy.
O, cancer center! Let me out of here!
It's just uncanny how presciently Fitzgerald/Khayyam described my mundane activities! Perhaps yours too. Today's challenge: take a passage from a well-known poem and alter it to describe an ordinary day in your life. Are you regretting The Doughnut Not Taken? Stopping to Buy Buds on a Snowy Evening? Raking Whitman's Leaves off Grass? Tell all about it--in verse.
3 comments:
O Cap’n! My Cap’n! You start my day with fun.
I love your tasty crunchberries and the great prize I just won.
You bring me cheer, You are so dear, I feel like I’m time trav’ling.
When I lift my steady spoon to my mouth, a great moment I am having.
A great start, start, start….
To my day. You got me out of bed.
I’m glad I let my son put you in the cart,
You and the cinnamon bread.
O’ Cap’n! My Cap’n! My alarm went off. I heard bells.
I arose for you, My Cap’n in blue. For you, my heart just swells.
When you get soggy, I don’t care. My devotion is unflagging.
Heck, even at the store, I was cheering while the kid was bagging.
Cap’n, you sailed through my dreams last night
When pillow was beneath my head.
Your sweetness beckoned, coaxing me up.
Just you and cold milk … and I'm fed!
:) Betsy
This is such a FUN assignment, but I'm grading, grading, grading away today and can't play....
Or maybe I can:
"From cliched and plain boring
And off topic monstrosities
And fallacies that keep me up nights,
Essay goddess, deliver us!"
[Original that I had to memorize in 1st grade:
"From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!"
Scottish Saying]
WHEN I consider how my life's misspent:
A cafeteria server, I hide
Behind the gal I rent who makes meth on the side,
And lodges with me truthless, though my goal more meant
To serve only wealth-makers,and thus prevent
My financal collapse, I need a guide.
At the rich, I smile, they're never denied.
"More?" I fondly ask; hoping to invent
An image of myself that's more than me,
I long to be a real restaurant waiter,
One who gets tips for not having the nerve
To tell the customers what jerks they be
I want to tell them all something greater:
"They also wait who only stand and serve."
Mike Geary
Tips accepted.
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