You Don’t Get Asked That Too Often

She wants to hear some of my poems.

You don’t get asked that too often.

So I choose the bright ones, the buoyant ones,

the ones with a lot of bounce.

She loves ‘The Wrong Saint’

the one about getting lost on our way back from the winery

and praying to St. Francis, instead of St. Christopher,

the patron saint of travellers.

No wonder we were getting lost.

We were praying to the wrong guy.

She loves Quilton too, that one I posted,

an early Covid poem,, Quilton Loves Your Bum’

with all its jackanapery.

I used to read to her as a child,

little stories I made up,

and now I’m reading to her again,

my little story poems,

at the age of 18.

my grand-daughter, Grace.

And she still loves what I write.

Can I stop now, I ask,

a little exhausted.

It’s good to have a fan.

The Mermaid Question

Seven year olds will always ask, at some stage when you are least ready for it, the mermaid question.

Granddad, Tina asks me, how do mermaids go to the toilet?

While you are grappling with this one, they ask another, THE BIG KAHUNA of questions, usually in the car while you are driving them to or from some event:

Grandad, where would I be if you and grandma never got married?

It’s the sort of question you need to pull over the side of the road for, but I kept on driving, hoping an apt answer would ‘pop’ into my head. Where’s the Muse when you need her? Surely she’d good for things other than poetry.

I don’t know what you would have done? I mean, how do you answer a question like that? There’s an obvious answer but that might depress the hell out of her, Who wants to be confronted at that age with self obliteration? And there’s the ontological answer but she wouldn’t get it.

I thought I’d go with the mermaid answer. That’d be the easier of the two …. maybe.