labour of love

Written for the dVerse quadrille Monday prompt “learn to labor or labor to learn“, 44 words exactly, including the word work (and dedicated to my darling twin boys and my husband who I didn’t listen to):

three years of hoping
nine months of waiting
twenty hours of labour
(two panadol)
two thousand loads of washing
twenty thousand meals
for two lumps on the couch
grunting and picking their pimples.

You were right dear,
a dog would’ve been less work.

The llama not eaten (yet), by T1

This is another of Twin 1’s poems for his English anthology assignment, again on the llama theme.  It was inspired by Henry Hogge’s The Pig Poets, one of my favourite books of poetry, and comes with apologies to Frost – although as Frost originally intended The Road Not Taken to be humorous, perhaps he wouldn’t mind too much:

Two llamas diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not eat them both
In a single sitting, long I stood
Then chased one llama as far as I could
To where it fell in the undergrowth;

when I am old and you are grown…

Tebogo (Amateur’s Quill) posed some excellent and very thought provoking questions about parenthood, which in spite of having three kids I was unable to answer. One of them was “What will they say to you [when they are grown]”? So, thinking I could get an answer to at least one question, I asked one of my sons, and he replied “I would say, what are you doing at my house?” So this is my reply to my darling boy:

the maiden, the mother and…

In response to Eugi’s weekly prompt “transition”:

From the maiden to the mother,

Troglodytes

In the fetid dark,
slack jawed and vacant eyed,
they hunch
hiding from the sun.

three little words

March 18th, 2008

When we left the hospital
the midwife said:
“Feed on demand!”