A hasty response to the following invitation from Mish at dVerse Poets Pub:

Greetings poets! Welcome to Open Link Night. As always, this is your opportunity to share ONE poem of any theme or form.

Or perhaps not hasty, as the original has been skulking like a shrunken balloon-spider on my hearth-mat to-do pile for nearly a month, waiting – like so much in my life – for processing.

Waiting for Diana


A movement snagged my sight

My vision was distracted

And there, to my delight,

A spider stood, impacted

Upon her trampoline

of wafty webby gossum

Then disappeared unseen

Instead of playing possum.


Behind the window blind

That hides the double shining

Her prey, entangled, find:

Flies, moths, as food combining.

She waits to pounce, to stun

With stings of potent venom

While I await my chum

In patchstrip made of denim.


© Kathy Labrum McVittie July 2022

And here’s the ‘patchstrip made of denim’, and braided hair, before my recent (Summer Solstice) operation. The coat is about twenty years old, made in India by a now-redundant, fairly trading company called Bishopston Trading.

The only garment I have ever owned that has made strangers cross a busy Cambridge road to say: “I love your jacket. Where on earth did you find that?”