Time for another quadrille challenge at dVerse Poets Pub.

Msjadeli – in a wonderfully rich, sobering and erudite look at the work of life, from laborious birth onwards – has suggested we riff on work-in-progress in a quadrille of exactly 44 words.

Well, having fretted about exactitudes and calibration as a scientist, and obsessed over the rights and wrongs of education, I am now getting lazy in my old age, and I have CHEATED.

I have pruned my pre-existing poem, removing the bit about a cat-shit contaminated sandpit at my infant school.

But the percussion instruments that were such a mystery to me at the same school – they are included, and at last I get my turn to play upon them.

As for the ‘holy work’: as William Blake said (Marriage of Heaven and Hell):

for every thing that lives is holy

Work-shopping, revisited

I am a shopper at my own holy work.

I mark my own essaying; 

I commend my performance, again and again.

I award myself a riff on the drums;

I select the beater, and resonate the triangle,

ringing out in a song and dance


© Kathy Labrum McVittie, 2022