It's Tuesday again already

Not putting up a Tuesday Poem. That way madness lies. I didn't manage to do anything on The Book yesterday. Wal came home (yippee!), we went to a family barbecue at Otari Gardens, and the grandchildren and their Auntie Julia came back here afterwards. Julia always says she's lame for hanging out at her parents' house at her age (35 in a few weeks), but it doesn't stop her from coming here and watching TV. She doesn't have one of her own. So last night I experienced the full joy of open plan living. Sitting in my little computer space I could hear Wally and Julia talking in the Great Room while he cut up 2 legs of pork for the freezer and she nominally watched a "boring" film on the tele. Above me on the mezzanine Sylvia (21) and Nina (11) played a game that involved a lot of toy smurfs and earachingly high squeaky voices arguing about who was the prettiest. Somewhere off in the distance, Kyle (19 - he's with Sylvia) and Zac (14) were deep in discussion about Assassins' Creed. I loved it, but it wasn't conducive to creative endeavours.

Today, on the other hand, I managed to get some work done. I printed out a photo on tissue paper (getting good at it!) and made a transparency of a poem printed in blue. Wasn't such a great success - the blue wasn't dark enough to overcome the slight opaqueness the gel medium imposes. I've stuck it in the book anyway, and will carefully write over it with a very fine gel pen, so I can keep it blue. It'll sort of look handwritten, but the lines will be straight and I'll keep within the margins, LOL.

Tomorrow's poem page is a bit of a bugger. It's painted red, but that hasn't covered the original printing on the page, so I'll have to find a way to work with it that covers the print but still allows the red to predominate. Will sleep on it.

Changed my mind - here's my Tuesday Poem. It's about the photo I printed on tissue paper.

Family Snapshot

There are three smiling faces:

Jennifer half-turned on her stool;
Ursula with her arm raised –
a reflex response to the camera;
Marilyn Monroe completes the scene,
confident of her place on the wall.

Jennifer’s red shawl apes
the apple print on her wallpaper,
a blue skirt reflects the sky of her eyes
and a green sash flashes in the middle,
matching spider plants and the windowsills.

Ursula is in traditional pink and white –
the colours of two-year-old girls –
out of place in a teenage boudoir
but hanging out with her sister
in velvet sneakers.

Sylvia has yet to come into focus,
still developing under my diaphragm,
and Julia is out of shot, a negative space.
Neither toddler nor teen,
Julia could be anywhere she chooses.

Instead she takes whatever she wants,
at night raiding the pantry,
that dark room that supplies our needs.
In a few years she will leave, after a blow-up
from which we believe we will never recover.