And the word is...

[ampoule]

Some, it seems, are born old
or never acquire the knack
of being foolish and young!
And some, it seems, have both
in good measure.

Yesterday, my daughter, 37,
her lover, 24, and my next to youngest
grand-daughter, going on 6, discovered
the school playground
across the way from me, entered
and went climbing on everything
they could find, then
one of them proposed a game of tag

and 37, 24 and going-on-6 were soon chasing each other
around and around, laughing
their fool heads off and you couldn’t have told
37 from 24 from going-on-6!

Prince...how very very delightful!

A quickie that comes to mind- I've had many spaghetti kisses

You little necked choochy butt,
With spaghetti on your face
Gum in your hair
Mud between your toes
And sticky sucker fingers
It’s time for a bath.
I’ll draw up the warm water with
Lots of bubbles and too many tub toys.
You can leave sand on the bottom
And a ring around the tub.
Once the water has turned cold on the floor
And you are clean and dry,
We’ll find your Spiderman pajamas
And think all the thinks you can think.

Awwww...that is really really sweet! And Prince's reply is darn cute too!

[motherhubbard]

prince it is very good. I can see them with rosy cheeks running and happy. It made me think of this which I have posted before-

I didn’t want to hear to them when
they said it would happen over night,
in the blink of an eye.

A week ago today I watched you play tag,
running and reaching with childish abandon-
free, uninhibited.

Today you applied eye shadow and lip gloss,
flipping your hair in the mirror
for hours.

What are you doing?
Go outside and run in the wind,
make a mud pie, get dirty!

There’s time and more time to be old,
but today is short and fading.
Take this minute and make it last.

Face the sky and spin.
You are young, but not for too long,
There’s no need to rush

[ampoule]

For the word was Childhood, I believe?

TRANSFORMATION #2

The snowflake skies were bright with cold;
the porch sprouted icicle fangs, the roads grew slick.
Strangely, the old man didn’t feel quite so old;

life bubbled inside him; something seemed to remold
him—the years fell away. (Now, that’s quite a trick!)
The snowflake skies were bright with cold

and his boots skidded, frantic for a foothold,
but he laughed at his grandson, hidden behind the Buick.
Strangely, the old man didn’t feel quite so old.

He ducked a well-aimed snowball and didn’t scold.
Instead he fired one back yelling, “You’re on, Rick!”
The snowflake skies were bright with cold

as they snowball fought their way back to the threshold,
laughing wildly at each other’s antics.
Strangely, the old man didn’t feel quite so old,

grabbing his grandson in thin arms to enfold
him in a hug that belied the fact that he was old and sick.
The snowflake skies were bright with cold—
strangely, the old man didn’t feel quite as old…

Dale Harris
©4/4/98

I love it Pen. Children keep us young. Playing is a child's work but it is our reward.

I'll comment on novelty later.

[firefangled]

Pen, Childhood was so sweet and reminded me of the scene in the Godfather where Vito and his grandchild were playing in the tomatoes. Very nice.

Some, it seems, are born old
or never acquire the knack
of being foolish and young!

This especially rang true.

Such a genuine life picture of losing (or is it finding) ourselves during a moment with how we used to play. Wonderful!

[firefangled]

It was Sunday night; they had been dancing slow,
in some Chapel St. dive, maybe feeling a highball —
my father had just come home from two years in Fiji,
and with her face burning from whiskey and waiting,
she was pressing into him, arms around his neck,
perfume and heat rising with his breathing.
There would have been no guilty hesitation later,
they would have ravaged each other like animals
and then lingered for hours in the chimerical sweetness
of touching, the light of nakedness pouring into dilated eyes.
They would have smiled like sleepy children and then slept
in the twisted singularity of forgetting they were two.

There are no photos of where I was waiting that evening,
but some say I made the choice knowing both of them —
that his hearing was growing lost with his lullabies,
and he would carry unknown for his life the incessant
shock and recoil of the guns aiming into his spot of light.
I knew, they say, and regardless went to her tenderness
that would petrify in the harsh desert of his fatherless anger,
I wanted to arrive, captured in the tangled web of Rome,
where they played out their duty in a different kind of story
than I can now write, and that would have served them better.
And though I can imagine remembering the music of their dance,
I am lost forever between that waltz and early Monday morning.

[firefangled]

This is mine, I think, the words
in their rows, like an ear of corn,
unique, and of course the screen with titles:
The Garden, Fortress, Love Poem.

Then I read a book of poems
by a “courageous writer,” “slicing
through the arbitrary,” “a writer
of astounding novelty.” Page
after page with gardens, and love,
fortresses of syntax and form.

How alike we are to use the same words
over and over and mean so many different things.

[CdnReader]

^^^ I love this, FF. The anthropology of language looks at WHY we choose the words we do.... both in speech and in writing. Not to mention wondering whether we can or how we can think of things if we don't know the "words" that go with them. This aspect of humanity is utterly fascinating, I think.

You're so right. All we do is continue to rework the same words into different orders, different formats. But what does it all MEAN?

[CdnReader]

.

play

play house, drink pretend tea
climb in the tent, hide and go seek
read a book, tell a story
snuggle

run outside, sing a silly song
push each other on the swing
share a pizza
giggle

a three-year-old pretending to be grown
and a grown-up pretending to be three

.
cdn/16may06
.


P.S. Amp.... Loved your "More" under the theme of avarice. Well done!

[ampoule]

.

play

play house, drink pretend tea
climb in the tent, hide and go seek
read a book, tell a story
snuggle

run outside, sing a silly song
push each other on the swing
share a pizza
giggle

a three-year-old pretending to be grown
and a grown-up pretending to be three

.
cdn/16may06
.


P.S. Amp.... Loved your "More" under the theme of avarice. Well done!

Thank you Cdn. Makin that little ball was fun. It reminds me of a Friendship Ball I got once that was full of very special treats and I was very greedy and did not share.

I like your play poem. Pretending is such fun.

[stephofthenight]

hey guys, whats the new word?

[ampoule]

hey guys, whats the new word?

Hey Steph! Good to see you. The word is CHILDHOOD.

[Granny5]

Summer

We don’t need no stinking shoes
Or toys to keep us happy
We just need an empty field
And trash to mark the bases
A watermelon patch in dark of night
And salt to add more flavor
Under the street light we’ll eat the hearts
And hope the farmer don’t catch us
A cotton field that’s tall enough
To hide our heads from the seeker
A neighbor lady who likes to tell
Stories of ghosts and undertakers
Give us a shovel and we’ll dig a pool
Cause someone has new flooring
We’ll use the old to line our pool
And we’ll swim till our toes are swiveled
Tomorrow will be another day
And we’ll find a new game to play
And when we grow old and think
Of these things we’ll smile and not
Remember of the toys we wanted

[ampoule]

Granny, I adore this. How did you know about my childhood? Well, some of it anyway. Mmmmm....watermelon hearts. I used to steal them from my husband's watermelon. He knew I could not be trusted but he would always go into the TV room after slicing his watermelon leaving the other half for my temptation....and I was weak and never prayed for strength.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Summer

We don’t need no stinking shoes
Or toys to keep us happy
We just need an empty field
And trash to mark the bases
A watermelon patch in dark of night
And salt to add more flavor
Under the street light we’ll eat the hearts
And hope the farmer don’t catch us
A cotton field that’s tall enough
To hide our heads from the seeker
A neighbor lady who likes to tell
Stories of ghosts and undertakers
Give us a shovel and we’ll dig a pool
Cause someone has new flooring
We’ll use the old to line our pool
And we’ll swim till our toes are swiveled
Tomorrow will be another day
And we’ll find a new game to play
And when we grow old and think
Of these things we’ll smile and not
Remember of the toys we wanted

How lovely how this flows out like one long breath of exaltation!

[PrinceMyshkin]

“Hope,” it was said,
“is the childhood of the world.”
I passed mine by the other day
on Villeneuve Street in Montreal
where it always waits for me.

The neighbourhood kids were still out there
playing sidewalk handball, roiller-skating,
Norma Dishell and Lionel Segal
and the Dalfen boys with their intriguing
older sisters, seldom seen,
but fantasized about in their young
womanhood, and Barney
Furstenfeld, Muriel and Harriet
Atkins and of course

the Garfinkle boys assisting their father
in the grocery. Blonde Jews!
Calm, soft-spoken, vigorous-bodied Jews!
I never knew what to make of them
but I loved going there
on errands for my Mom.
I make a point of driving by that block
whenever I can, to revisit my childhood
and wave fondly at it as I drive by...