Wednesday, November 10, 2010

It Might Start with the Violence of Thanksgiving Day


Sometimes the wife and I team up to help with the children's homework. Last night it got hilariously out of hand…

I posted on Facebook:
Damn. I suffer with the 6th grade poetry homework. Anyone want to come help her? I can't take it. 
We need poem about Thanksgiving with a title, 2 stanzas with 4 lines each, 1 metaphor, 2 similes, 1 personification, and imagery. This is torture. Why can't they ask her to write a self-help book?
She is writing it and we seem to differ on our respective understandings of the basic concepts of metaphor and simile and personification. It can be non-rhyming, but she isn't really handling it very well. She is writing these rhythmic lines and plugging in whatever last word she wants because it doesn't have to rhyme. I'm dying here.
I'm such an O-Mom.
The love of my life replies, from her office upstairs where she is supposed to be studying, with the following series:  

A day for turkey, as tradition demands
Not tofu or soy, only birds in the plans
Poor turkeys in corners shivering with fear
As the feast, like a racecar, rolls ever more near

Tradition, tradition, the American machine
Its gears chewing up the humane and the "green"
We fight here like mad dogs, all caught in the fray
It might start with the violence of Thanksgiving Day
_____
Or were you looking for something a little, um, "warmer?"
I title it "The Annual Bloodletting."
Subtitled "Happy Holidays."
I got your Norman Rockwell right here...


I howled and wept and eventually gathered myself enough to reply: 
You are the best wife... ever. Period. The rest of you divas just lost your status. Sorry.

The best part? Tonight, it's haiku homework. My wife thinks in haiku… that's owesome.