Greetings, dearest Toads! Welcome to another Sunday
Mini-Challenge. Grab your muse and let’s explore uncanny poetry… with
youngsters in it. Children can be delightfully creepy. The same can be said of
some of the lullabies we sing to them, and of many of the nursery rhymes they like
to sing amongst themselves. Remember the cute:
“Ring-a-round the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.”
What’s sweeter than a rosie and a bunch of posies in spring?
Very few things, I’m sure. But that double shot of ashes is just eerie. One of
my favorites—and a much (much!) darker bone chiller—appears in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:
“Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Constance, would you like me to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”
Both the motif and tone of these lines make me blink a few
extra times. For today’s challenge, I’m looking for seemingly sweet lullaby-like poems, which ooze this sort of
creepiness. Craft them fun, write them dark, make my inner-giggling-child want
to run far, far, far.
Detail
from the cover of We Have Always Lived in
the Castle
Please,
feed Mr. Linky (below) with the direct link to your poem.
Visit
other Toads. Their poems want to sing to you, really.