General

Good evening fellow scribblers and welcome to tonight’s MTB session.

Contrapuntal music is composed of multiple melodies that are relatively independent that are sounded together. In the poetic world, contrapuntal poems are poems that intertwine two (or more) separate poems into a single composition.

Tonight we are going contrapuntal.

Here is a beautiful example with explanatory notes from the poet.

Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito by Tarfia Faizullah
—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka

As Celeste sat reading the news came on and the lead story was, of course, the secret mines. She chuckled at the premature conjecture that had infected the masses with a sort of vuja de’ way of turning all the facts upside down and mixing it with urban legends!! Last she heard people were actually whispering that Al Capone himself was living poshly in an underground city and running the mines from there.

Celeste shook her head and turned back to her reading. The history of the old hotel was interesting and the original owner had a bit of a pedigree as well as a small fortune and a seriously good business acumen. The hotel was indeed originally built as an upscale spa-like orphanage. They spared no expense in construction, decorating and stocking supplies befitting the status of their little charges. Then they hired what they believed to be well…

bury me so that
I may breathe easy – I have
been dead a long time

In response toReena’s Exploration Challenge #Week 37

When I first went to work in the country, I was a long way from anywhere. Australia is like that. You don’t have to go far to be between nowhere and anywhere.

We arrived in this small country town and settled into life away from family and friends but with the prospect of forming new friends and establishing a new home.

The first weekend there the man who was to be my immediate boss, my Head Teacher English, had us over for dinner. He used the opportunity to tell me about the school and the students who attended.

As this was a country area, the school drew from places near and far. One place, the next biggest town, was down on the border and so, further from anywhere than we were. It was a bit of a frontier town and came with its own reputation.

My Head Teacher shook his…

Photo credit: Flora Borsi

Gwendolyn Anders was being deconstructed. No one else could tell the forty-five year old divorced woman was falling apart. She couldn’t afford to let anyone know. She had to keep moving, go to work each day, make sure her two kids got to and from school, did their homework, ate healthy meals, made it to soccer practice.

She did her best to adhere to the “supermom” stereotype, and as far as the rest of the world was concerned, she was successful.

Inside where no one could see, she was bleeding to death.

Illustration: Al Margen

Parents have expectations, don’t they?

You want your child to be successful in some sort of way acceptable to you.

My parents, I think, wanted us to be competent in whatever we did.

They were very working class people despite my mother’s mother stepping out of that comfort zone and mixing with some people of a higher class we stayed where we belonged.

We had a piano, an old one, out of tune most of the time and an instrument my mother could play one tune on.

So as I must have appeared the most likely of we four kids I was sent to piano lessons. My first teacher was a young nun, Sister Sunshine, whom I loved having lessons with. (She is still alive and thriving in her 80s). But she was moved on soon after I started to like the piano and Sister Demon took…