Excuses

The gathering of women on this site has the potential to reach so many, and secure meaningful connections of positive cooperation all over the world. One connection at a time, we can support each other as we change our world for the better. Women have been connecting and making their communities better places since the beginning of time. Today, we make those connections in an instant – from one side of the world to the other. I am so privileged to be a part of this process.

As a boomer aged woman it is especially encouraging to see the generations that are following my own search, and finding a better way to be in the world. It gives me so much hope for my grown children, grandchildren, and the great grandchildren I hope to know some day in the future. It gives me hope that they’ll be able to live in a society that puts relationships ahead of material things and looks for ways to heal the world with love, gratitude, compassion and cooperation, instead of survival of the fittest and “who has the most toys at the end of the game”.

I’ve been privileged to have had a couple of my poems posted at Wf1. I love sharing my thoughts about the relationships we share among many other things. My yearning to write comes to me quite honestly from my grandmother, as well as her sister, and others who lived before me; who left their creative accomplishments to be enjoyed and provide inspiration for future generations.

Recently, my mother gave me a little notebook that belonged to my grandmother. In it are several poems and stories she wrote in the early forties. This one seemed a good one to share as it is about finding the time to write the things that yearn to be laid to paper and so become real things instead of just thoughts bouncing around in our heads. Grandma struggled with many of the same day to day challenges that today’s women do in finding time to be creative and expressive.

As you will see from reading her poem, she didn’t take herself too seriously. She did however take the time to lay words to paper now and then, and left me a legacy I am proud to carry on. What legacy has a person in your life left for you to carry on?

EXCUSES

Why don’t I write? Why kid ourselves?
Volumes of classics mould on the shelves.
My days are so filled with routine endeavor
There’s no time left to write or be clever.

Some poets go to town on moonlight and roses
But who can do that and wipe little noses.
My sympathies stray from trite love tales
Whenever I step on my bathroom scales.

How can I scribble of love and romance,
While working on buttonholes in floursack pants?
Romantic ballads are nipped in the bud
When clothes lines break and fall in the mud.

How can I help but fumble a ditty
When a dozen stray cats are wooing my kitty?
Metered phrases forsooth must wait
While I herd a pig thru the garden gate.

Anthology loses gems galore
While I scrub jam from my kitchen floor.
I can’t write poetry to save my soul
Mixing oleo in a cracked yellow bowl.

A hitch in meter ruins my sonnet
Whenever I see my pre Hoover bonnet.
The muse eludes my far faint call
When I swat flies on my kitchen wall.

Milton’s ghost sits smug and tight
While I trim a twig to settle a fight.
There’s no crowding over in the hall of fame
When I slam the door on a book selling dame.

Flights of fancy are not for me
When a fly does an Immelmann and flops in my tea.
Couplets a plenty but I fear too shocking
When I snag a run in my new silk stocking.

Wellsprings of rhythm go dry in a trice
When one of the kids comes home with lice.
Fountains of eloquence squirt their last squirts
When my darlings insist that etiquette’s nerts.

The muse come hither on leaden legs
When a sitting hen deserts her eggs.
It isn’t poetry that fills the air,
When a tire blows out and we have not spare.

By Sara Achey

Jackie McDaniels

With Great Respect and Love,
Kelly McNelis Senegor
Founder, Women For One