My Mouldering Marrow

Having gone on about life being a series of repairs (previous post), I was not surprised to find myself spending hours at the weekend, fitting a draught-shutter actuator to a Vent-Axia fan, embedded in a wall of our shower room. You can tell I grew up in the days when we made our own entertainment.

Time, I thought, to revive my poem, I Bleakly Dwell:


Eight words of Jaan Kaplinski are churning
round my brain - because I carelessly let
just one courgette get big, and bigger, turning
at last to a vast phallic marrow, set

hard amongst my spent tomatoes. I hauled
its bulk into the kitchen, keenly sliced
and diced its flesh, while forever appalled
at how much there was left. Some bits got spiced;

then soups and stews. But weeks went by and the thing
was forsaken, abandoned in its clingfilm sheath;
until today when I sniffed a whiff. 'Fling
it out at once,' I thought, and reached beneath

its deep-green bulk, releasing floods of brown-
ish slime to pour over cartons, tin cans,
and carpet. So, wearily, with cloth (and frown)
I cleaned the lot, from A-Z: All-Bran's

pack to zabaglione. I bleakly dwell
on wasted hours, things unachieved. Despair!
Kaplinski's line's now mingling with the smell:
'Life is just an endless work of repair.'


(Quote taken from Kaplinski's Ice And Heather.)

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