Best Croquet Poems
I miss so many things: the old pear tree, which once lived by the walk and the bees inside. The bees almost never stung, but made the most delightful buzz. The smell of the pear blossoms and the fruit as it rotted on the ground. I even miss the colonies of ants, which swarmed. You see, I chopped it down. Well, the bees stung my ex-husband, or, he was scared of the bees, or some such thing. The bees like the cat, knew more about the true core of the man than I did. Once the cat shat on his side of the bed, and pulled the sheet over it. Even then, I didn’t really hear nature’s call. I miss the rose bushes, which I tore out because of the June bugs. “Mustn’t have untidy, ugly, things around me,” fool that I was, and continue to be. I have almost eradicated the wild violets. Soon, even I will be gone. “Who will remember all that sweetness? Oh, the pear crisp with crumbled cinnamon crust on a Fall day, all gone.”
a mown lawn
stretches to the horizon –
a hedge clipper whir
The Rose Queen was a lesser villain than I. She was imaginary and I am real, or so I believe. “If you’d lived with Alice would you have played croquet with a flamingo club?”
First Published in Contemporary haibun January 2014
Border
guard hoops
and hedgehog balls;
striking flamingos; painted-rose
walls
There once was a lady with a story.
She made it up for fame and glory.
Her topic, a bit risque.
A naked game of croquet.
The description was very gory.
When Nature frees the lotus
(This year's debut emergence)
From their sleeping seeds,
When they begin to cress the surface,
I shall stand with broadened smile,
My heart's joy augment threefold;
And when the lillies burst
In galvanic evening's gold,
If the expansion of elation
Don't mean I'm likely doomed
To laugh so hard confined
In the vaulted night perfumed
And if I don't spit out my life
When the lillies shoot their seeds
And no tremors shall have seized my heart
Nor Death, my ticket, heeds:
When Cold caresses the membranes,
Bringing the lillies to rot and break,
Bowing down before the wind,
Their thirst, face down, to slake,
They later will be frozen
On the very coldest day,
Bent into the wickets
Of Spatterdock Croquet.
and now we bask in the bloodlust
waiting for another reason
to whimper,
“why do they hate us?”
You’ve always
let me win at croquet
and I could never
figure out why
until the day
I saw you smile
into the sun
and move your lips
in silence
and wink to a passing cloud
and purposely hit
the ball astray.
emagi Alice Guerin Crist. 'CROQUET'
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Discriminating palates
garnish salads with shallots
But when eating croquettes
avoid mallets