found poems, films and cats

Our cat, it has to be said, is a grump. She disdains affection, except from Sam, she vomits on the carpet and leaves dirt and hair all over the place. She is a dissatisfied house guest and has this look on her that conveys all sorts of phrases like:

“I’m waiting, get the door open.”

“I’m not eating that old tuna so you can just get rid of it”

“So you’re back from your fancy holiday are you?”

but I think she is dying.

Her back legs are giving up, she has developed a sweet old white haired look, she sleeps a lot more and both of us are becoming hopelessly devoted to her needs. We will all miss her terribly. (but it will be good to be able to replace the carpet…)

Our poetry exercise for Tuesday is to “use other people’s words”. That mean we can pick phrases form different places and put them together anyway we choose. You can be very formal about it and choose from a jar, sort of poetry bingo and choose only from certain lines and so on or you can just randomly go for it. I have done two, one form an article and the other from two books. It is really creative and fun to do so have a go and submit your results here on line please!

From an article about

Plants for Bees
The humble honey bee
Mumbles farmers can help
Quality pollen.

Queens breeding right royally
Recommend abundant flowers
By beekeepers in flowering times

As the news is so grim right now and I’ve written about plane crashes, domestic violence, oppression of women and so on, the thought of examining an oil spill article was too much  so I went for two books. Firstly, 100 Afghan Squares To Knit by Debbie Abrahams and secondly Dear Heart, 150 New Zealand Love Poems edited by Paula Green. The latter was given to me for my birthday and I love it so it’s a lovely gift for those who like poetry. The former continues my obsession with knitting squares.

 

 

Tell Me You’re Waiting

Being a child of the seventies it was inevitable,
None of them have stayed together.
He was my bright sea-bird on a rocky beach,
Bright happy colours embellished with beads.

The moon is a gondola
While the flower is a basic repeating shape.
With your fisherman’s knife you slash a red bloom
From the rosebush.
Wildflowers work until completed.

I have always been lucky with ribbon and rosebuds.
It is reminiscent of the pointed bunting
Strung along the busy side-streets.
When things get too hard to bear,
Place the old pink yarn over the new blue yarn,
Ending and going home to where love lives,
High above the town.

The Auckland Film Festival has begun. They have really upped their game on the app for it thank goodness.

So far I have been to Love is a Strange about two older gay chaps who get forced out of their flat because they decided to get married (after 39 years!) and the religious school one of them teaches at, fires him. They are forced to camp at friends’ places and so are separated for the first time and have to live with all the close-up foibles of themselves and others. I thought Charlie Tahan as the troubled teen was terrific.

I found it charming and very enjoyable and would recommend it. It will probably go mainstream.

The other turned out to be 3.5 hours long and was called The Last of the Unjust. This was an extended documentary interviewing the last of the Jewish Elders who survived the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The interview took place n 1975 but has just now been released. The subject of the film, Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi was reviled for his complicity with the Nazis. He is hard to like but you start to think he is human and also not the person he was painted perhaps. I like his thought, “All people in the camps were martyrs but not all of them were saints.”

Once again it is an examination from a different point of view of the “Final Solution”. Recommended.

Today I am grateful for the rain, the warmth and the time. How about you? FG