Butterflies

I’m sorry, butterflies. The buddleias are in such a sorry state, like the rest of the so-called garden and it’s my fault. I’m not responsible for the lack of rain or the heatwave – did I miss that? – but we went away for weeks on end, leaving plants to look after themselves. Garden neglect. No sooner were we back from our travels south, when we were off in the caravan. We didn’t go far, probably only a half hour walk away from home to Marton Mere for a Haven break. It wasn’t a holiday, though being there made it feel like one. We left our house to the mercy of the company entrusted to replace our damp course. We relaxed with ice creams, beer and whatever was on the menu in the Boathouse, then returned home to a job perfectly done. Thanks, team. Within days we were missing caravan life and quickly organised a trip north to join family and celebrate our wedding anniversary. The garden was beyond all hope, so I left it.

Buddleia, white blooms and quite majestic, fared better than the purple or pink and a few butterflies were enjoying themselves, but not the abundance we’ve known in previous summers. Those summers when we’ve stayed at home and I’ve tended the garden properly.

One dry day when the air was still, I spent time chopping up bramble that had crept along the ground. At last, a path for me to reach the marigolds and dead-head them.

Not a single nasturtium has graced us. Lack of water, so down to my absence again. The grandchildren were fascinated with watching the caterpillars that fed from them, growing from tiny to huge. The survivors would go on to become butterflies. The grandchildren have grown out of the story, ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, but I haven’t. It continues forever in the infant’s library I help to look after.

When I started school, age 4, 1959, my coat peg had a picture of a butterfly above it. Each child could identify their peg by a picture. Children have names, now. I would have recognised my name at the time, but it’s just the way things were done in those good old days.

I found this poem,

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted,
And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said, ‘Do not eat the poor butterfly.’
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing,
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother’s lap.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry 1888 - 1923

The butterfly cross stitch is one of mine, from when I could see what I'm doing.

Thanks for reading, Pam x      

Read More

Happy Anniversary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (exclamation marks just for Vicky)

I'm going to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton,

Jump down, turn around, pick a bale a day...

Yes folks, this week sees the second anniversary for the Dead Good Blog, and according to tradition that means COTTON. Though tradition states that these anniversary gift should be exclusive to marking the length of time two people, and remembering that this tradition dates back to the Roman times, made up of a man and a woman have been married.

I'm not the greatest one for tradition so I say they can be used to mark the passing of another year for anybody, and that people of the same sex can marry.

So this week we should be buying the Dead Good Bloggers gifts of Cotton. This could be t-shirts, plantations or Dot. However, in the United States things have been updated, there is a more modern, some may say relevant list. This new list includes gift like Clock, Silverware and Electrical Appliances.

This would mean that this year is the China Anniversary. Which in turn would mean more useful or wanted gifts. Taking this school of thought even further why not sell the Anniversary rights to businesses. So for the next 5 years, 10 years of marriage would be the i-Pad Anniversary or 4 years down would be the Amazon Kindle Anniversary.

This would certainly go some way to ensuring people are not disappointed by the gift their spouse has purchased to show they actually remembered.

So happy Anniversary Bloggers and Poets, here's to many more years.

Read More

Deck the Halls

 by Ashley Lister

It's always been a Christmas tradition in our household to put up the decorations on December 1st.

December 1st is our wedding anniversary. (It's also World AIDS Day, which is a nice thing to think about each year when we're celebrating). As a way of celebrating another year of marital bliss we murder a tree and desecrate its corpse with empty decorative balls. If I were a poet I'd probably perceive a metaphor in that paragraph.

This year we almost let the tradition slip past.

As some of you may know, Tracy has been under the weather recently and recovering from a bout of pneumonia. She's just about recovered but even something as banal as decorating a tree proved too tiring - yet she still wanted to be a part of the tradition.

So we waited.

We waited so long that the Muslim family over the road from us managed to get there decorations up ahead of us this year. But, with the impetus of family coming for Christmas dinner and stricken by the terror of having a year without the decorations being in place, we finally got round to making the house look festive this week.

I've already shared my Christmas poem on the blog earlier this week. All I can think to write here is a very short verse that does have a festive subtext.

No one ties knots better 

than a sailor on a yacht

(the monkey's paw, the lark's head 

and the ligature knot).

No one ties more knots 

than a cub scout for his badge

(save for maybe Christian Grey 

whilst he gets at Anna's vadge).

No one ties them tighter 

to stop things from coming loose:

The bowline and the figure eight - 

the cat's paw and the noose.

The granny and the reef knot 

and the famous henchman's splice: 

But no one can tie all these knots

Except my string of Christmas lights. 

Read More

I’m a lot of things, but cute ain’t one of ‘em..

 by Michelle Hayward

I once had a relationship with a man who would regularly send handwritten postcards through the mail, and scribble little love notes within the pages of books; how lovely it was to get to page 96 and find an unexpected message inscribed in the margin of my current read. 

Yet despite all this attention to detail, I was shocked when the same guy failed to acknowledge my birthday.  He said it was the everyday gestures that mattered in life – that he’d rather express his feelings when it felt right rather than to mark the reoccurring date of a past event.  And in light of his usual thoughtfulness, how could anyone argue with that?  I totally got it - he was absolutely right! Although I still wasn’t clear why the miserable rotten bastard had accepted a birthday card and gift from me two months earlier?

Detecting my dissatisfaction, he scurried off and returned with a large flat box.  Intrigue rapidly turned to horror as I unveiled a giant padded birthday card, embossed with a hybrid elephant-bear. I was curious, and quite frankly annoyed, as to why he thought I was a gigantic padded-card mule-bear type of gal in the first place? (And I’m not going to make you relive the bastardisation of the poetic form encountered inside the thing – we’ve all had cause to visit the dark place that is Hellmark.)

Look, I’m hardly an arbiter of good taste myself, but I really don’t do cute.  How could he not know that?  How could such a seemingly profound person, send such a vomit inducing nylon card to me?  I wondered if my demands had altered his perception of me. I began to hope he found nylon teddy-bear pictures appealing; it was better than thinking I did. But then did I really want to spend my life with a man who found nylon teddy-bear pictures appealing?  Perhaps he was trying to prove a point – of course he was being ironic!

The whole fiasco culminated in me melting down into a semiotic crisis of contradictions.  Sending the wrong card became more damaging than not sending a card at all.  Believe it or not, I don’t usually care much for my own personal anniversaries, but perhaps on this occasion, I made it matter.  I didn’t really care about a birthday card; I wanted to know if he loved me. The card suggested he did (‘I LOVE YOU’ was written on the front).  But now the card had put me right off the man.

I took his postcards out of the drawer. They were standard blank postcards containing a few fairly innocuous words ‘Thinking of you always xx’. I flicked back through the novel notes - the same.  I realised it was the method in which the messages had been presented that had impressed me, rather than the messages themselves. Paradoxically, that’s how greeting cards generally function – their sentiment is expressed in the act of sending the message, rather than writing it.

In the end, this issue was more than our relationship could withstand; a fluffy animal – an unexpected everyday gesture, eradicated all hope of irony.  All the same, I do regret repeatedly stabbing his forever hippo-bear with my eye-liner pencil. 

Afterwards, I told everyone we had separated because we were unable to settle our artistic differences.  He told everyone I was a nightmare psycho bitch from hell and told me never to darken his door again...

Read More

Since Sliced Bread

 By Ashley Lister

Our theme this week is anniversaries. This blog post goes live on July 7^th. And July 7^th marks the anniversary of the first commercially produced and distributed loaves of slices bread.

On July 7^th, 1928, (according to Wikipedia) the Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri, produced their first sliced loaf. It was the world’s first commercially produced sliced loaf.

The slicing was done by a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. It was a machine capable of converting a whole loaf into slices of even and uniform thickness.

The sliced loaves were then marketed under the slogan, “The greatest step forward in baking since bread was wrapped.” It will come as a surprise to no one that this gave rise to the popular saying, “The greatest thing since sliced bread.”

And I mention this because I figured we could tie our anniversary in with the anniversary of the sliced loaf by having commentors contribute uniform ‘slices’ of a composite poem.

The rules are straightforward. Simply write one ten syllable line of poetry in the comments box and we’ll see if we can compile them into a full length poem. It doesn't have to be profound. It only has to be a single 'slice' of poetry. I'm going to submit the first one below:

The greatest thing since the first slice of bread

Hopefully, if there are enough lines, I can assemble this into a poem for a forthcoming weekend.

Ash

Read More

One Candle

A year ago this week, I found myself sitting in this very same chair, thinking exactly the same thought as I have for, oh, about a year. What in hell am I going to write for this blog? It is a question that has plagued me since the off- right from that very first post when I confidently predicted to “have no idea what you can expect to read on these pages” and one that still itches away beneath my skin now. Yet weekly, I put both you guys and myself through it. There have been some funny old posts, some downright ridiculous and some we can all look back on with pride.

In that first post I promised we would have some punchy wordsmiths. Well, aside from our own blogging just have a look through some of the guest bloggers we’ve had this year. I said there would be group news on here and we have aimed to inform you of the events, to report back and at the same time, keep poetry and Blackpool current.  I feel, as a site still cutting its milk teeth in the scheme of things, we have done a pretty good job. I know of very few sites trying to approach poetry blogging like we do, so to all the other bloggers, thanks for making me feel such a pressure to write every week- you guys set the standard so high!

Finally, I’ll just say how proud I am to have been a dead good blogger this year. Long may we continue and, short of doing a birthday speech, I’ll leave it at that.

Thanks for your continued support and a very happy birthday to us!
S

Read More