Sunday June 23rd, 2013

The exercise:

Write about: sticking to your guns.

To make up for getting rained out of the garden last week I went out to get some weeding done this morning. The garlic, I'm happy to report, can breath again now.

Hmm, that sounds rather more sinister than I had intended...

Mine:

With dawn came the attack,
We stood ready to fight;
They gave us no respite,
Though day soon became night.

We held firm at our posts
As stars punctured the sky
And bullets echoed loud
In the towers on high.

We were breached at midnight
And some fools chose to run;
The north wind was blowing,
So I stuck to my gun.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done on getting the weeding done! And well done on catching up on comments too :) As a side-note, the Inn of the Shire stuff will (unfortunately?) always be dark as I never much Tolkien's almost dismissive "the war is over and everything is back to the way it was" approach.
Your poem feels like it wants to be performed; someone standing on stage and incanting it before a hushed audience :)

Sticking to your guns
"The garlic can breath again," said Judy. She looked up from the computer screen, the only source of light in the lab. She appeared pale in its glow, with odd patches of pastel colour from the pie-charts on the screen. "It's definitely sticking to its guns on this one, and it's winning."
Martin shivered. He'd been interning with Professor-Architect Judy Delacroix for three weeks, and in the first week he'd learned that garlic was more than just a vegetable, and in the next two that so-called "lower lifeforms" were much better at persevering than humans.
"The bleach didn't work?" he asked.
"Sodium hypochlorite," corrected Judy. "It did, but not for long enough. How are you getting on with that cyanide?"
They were hunting, desperately now, for a way to stop the garlic breathing so it would go dormant. They were certain that this was the only way to buy themselves enough time to work out how to kill it completely.
"As lethal as it's going to get," said Martin. "I don't think I can get it to act any faster. But..."
"What?"
"Are we sure that the garlic is breathing oxygen?"

Marc said...

Greg - I don't think I ever gave that much thought, but I can see how it wouldn't sit well with you. Ah well, at least it has spawned some (darkly) fun writing!

I figured you wouldn't be able to pass up that garlic line :P