For my Sis

[blackberry444]

As you liked the other one, I thought you might like to see this. I don't know whether you've ever heard the story before about our poor dog Buster and her pups who had to be destroyed after the pups were bitten by a rabid dog, and how we had to drive for a whole day to collect the vaccine, which then had to be administered by painful daily injections into the groin, 21 each for Ma and Pa and 14 for me.

Afternoon Rest 1951

The mad dog stands
by the basket of pups, fangs
bared in a terrible smile.
Their frantic mother barks
frenzied, stranded by her lead
wound round the table legs.
The yellow dog grips the pups
in his jaws, tossing them
yelping, one by one
into the air.

Frozen beneath the mosquito net
I agonise..............call for help......
risk attack................ or stay silent,
and who knows what will happen?

"Daddy come quick and bring your gun,
the mad dog's here", that and the barking
bring him full pelt and naked
loading as he runs.
Shaking, half-blind without his glasses
he shoots....................and misses.

The rabid dog stares drooling
as Pa reloads, then,
contemptuous, indifferent,
leaps through the woven grass
of the hut wall.

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I'm actually now trying to construct a web-site where I will put all my poems, but I think it will take rather a long time.

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Geraldine Messenbird Smith asserts her copyright over this and any other content of her LJ except for anything which may be directly quoted from another source.

Comments

[hooloovoo_42]

Wow! Powerful and topical.

It shouldn't take too long to set up a website if you have space from your ISP. If you know how you want it laid out and organised, you can do it in Word and save the pages as html, then it's just a case of ftp-ing it to your server.

If you want your own domain name, check out one of the hosting companies. The Sheddi will have a load of advice on that.

[blackberry44.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Yes, I'd forgotten about the recent outbreak. I hope the treatment is less painful nowadays.

I'm already making the pages with Personal WebKit and I think I'd prefer a web host separate from my ISP so that I don't have to change everything if I change ISP. I'm looking at 007.

It's assembling all the poems and links which is going to take all the time, but I want to do it properly, so I shall do it in stages and keep testing it.

Then there's the photographs. I do have a Flickr account, but I think I might as well put my better photos on my site as well, which will take a similar length of time.

Actually I'm quite pleased to be doing it, as it's giving me something extra I can do when the weather is horrid as it is today.

[anshackles.livejournal.com]

personally, I find flickr irritatingly slow to load.

There's rather a nice sharware thing for doing web page albums, called Arles. You put the pictures you want into a directory and let it loose and it generates thumbnail pages and so on for to upload.

[anshackles.livejournal.com]

powerful stuff, there, Geri.

BTW, when viewing your journal the salient bits are all off the right-hand side of a quite-wide (1440 pix) screen, such that to see all of it one has to scroll. Might not be the same everywhere, of course.

[blackberry44.livejournal.com]

BTW, when viewing your journal the salient bits are all off the right-hand side of a quite-wide (1440 pix) screen, such that to see all of it one has to scroll. Might not be the same everywhere, of course.

I've noticed that happening with other people's journals too, notably Carol's. I have absolutely no idea what causes it, since I just use a straightforward LJ page.

I wonder what the problem is.

mad dog

[oiorpata.livejournal.com]

That's a very powerful poem Geraldine, I'm all shocked and shakey after reading it. What a brave young thing you were.
Karen

Re: mad dog

[blackberry44.livejournal.com]

Why, Thank You, Grand Matriarch.

Not really brave. I was terrified but didn't know what else to do. The dog might have gone for me after the puppies and I'd been told all about what rabid dogs could do. Cos they don't care, see, cos they're mad!