Tag Archives: Lanzarote

Riddles – writing prompt

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Most of January I was on Lanzarote. I was unwell, so I spent much of my time reading in the Piano Bar of the hotel. Here is a view from the balcony. In the distance is Fuerteventura.

I also forgot about posting the answers to Vasko Popa’s riddles which I posted in December. The riddles are from his collection The Golden Apple, 2010. It’s a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles that Popa himself selected from various anthologies of Serbo-Croatian folk literature. Here are the riddles and their answers, followed by another riddle.


Riddles

  1. In one room both bone and flesh grow.
  2. I stretched a gold thread through the wide world and wound it up into a walnut shell.
  3. I shake a tree here, but the fruit falls half an hour away

Answers


1 Egg
2 Eyesight
3 The sound of a bell

    Photo
Photo credit: stevepb via Pixabay

Riddle


With an iron key
I open a green fortress
And drive out the black cattle

Ode of sorts…

1 Reply

Last Saturday I had to go to the pharmacy in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote to get some over-the-counter medication. It’s an ode of sorts alright…

Normal service will be resumed…

To ‘my’ condition

I salute you: you have staying power.
You arrived out of nowhere 28 years ago.
How odd you only woke up in Manchester,
while you slept through London.

I refuse to call you mine, the two ‘ ’
symbolise handcuffs, shackles.
On long journeys (flights, trains)
I wear dark trousers, a dark dress.

You have grounded me many times,
I’ve been bent over, clutching my bike,
scared to go to the shops in case I
don’t make it to a loo.

An acronym close to that computer firm.
There are dress codes at IBM, I have you know.
Irritable? Yes, often. I’ve been pissed off,
imagine bowels as a curled-up, snarling cobra.

Syndrome is, I believe, where spectators
gather to see retired pilots take off
in noisy small planes. Banking
is a dangerous manoeuvre.