The Bickerers
written by: Jim Murdoch
We bicker.
Seems to be an old age thing, bickering.
Neighbours and children squabble,
mums and dads fight,
but old farts like us, we bicker,
I’d like to think, affectionately.
We’ll say that anyway, affectionately.
“To quarrel or petulantly contend with words,”
apparently, but I object to “petulant.”
“Recalcitrant,” yes, indubitably, but “petulant?”
Pah!
The wife would agree but not to the “the.”
Probably not to a “my” either as it smacks
of ownership.
I know someone I’d like to give a smack to.
An affectionate smack.
Like one of those slo-mo chin punches.
Jim Murdoch grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevance—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in 1973 he read Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney' and felt as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. How could something so... so seemingly unpoetic be poetry? He aimed to find out.
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