Kookaburra

 Mindful Poetry Contest 2013 – Tercetonine

Tug-of-love

(a cranky and gobby dedication to my kids)

Excited, I arrive in a city I love

Abundant bird life, cooing dove

And that pesky kookaburra, so rowdy and cranky.

Google-oogle-oogle him; you will find

Laughing habits fair split to bust your mind

Opens wide his beak, on and on his warbly, wobbly, gobby technique

And the Apostle Bird with very a long tail

They form a breeding group with a dominant male

Now there’s true reverence, a little critter with transcendence

And there’s the colourful Purple-Crowned-Lorikeet

To find a bird like that, such a gob-stopping treat

Brisbane, city now seen from above, gripping me with this tug-of-love

Benita k. (c) 10.4.2013

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981868320#.UloAUYsLTec.facebook

Benita’s beautiful poem was a strong contender for the Poem-of-the-Day prize in Susan Budig’s Mindful Poetry Contest 2013 in which my creation, the Tercetonine, featured as a challenge on Day 8. I was honoured by Susan’s request to act as a judge for that day and realised what a hard job she has when she must pick the winner every day during the month-long contest. It was indeed rewarding to read the 16 lovely Tercetonines, but it was very, very hard to choose the winner. I was tossing between a light-hearted and a more serious theme. The more serious theme won – the runner-up was Benita’s light-hearted poem ‘Tug-of-love’. I wrote then that I wished there was some acknowledgement for the runner-up because I wanted so much to give it to this poem. Well, I’m doing it now. 🙂

I was thrilled when Benita accepted my invitation to appear on my blog. Benita can be contacted on Facebook and at www.gather.com.

Benita Kape: Active in small Gisborne writing group during the nineties. From the millennium became involved with haiku (World Haiku Club) on-line receiving an Honourable Mention in Mainichi Daily News 2002 end-of-year haiku selection. The following year William J. Higginson (author of The Haiku Handbook) invited her to work collaboratively with nine other global poets as a direct global haiku response to the outbreak of the war in Iraq in a Kasen Renku titled “On The Road to Basra” which appears on-line. Other work appears on-line in nzepc – (fugacity and oban seminars); Haibun Today, Lynx, Simply Haiku, also on-line and in the New Zealand print journal of haiku, tanka, haibun and related genres, Kokako. On Nov 1st Benita will be reading at a National Poetry Conference in Hastings, New Zealand. Since 2006 she has been a member of Gather.com.

Happy reading, Benita! 🙂

© irina dimitric 2013