PAD Day 6: Work Wisdom and Whistling

 As I usually do in April, I follow the poetry of, and trade comments and compliments with, my friend Vince Gotera, who earlier this year was named the Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa. I'm very happy that he won this well-deserved title, and you can read some of his excellent poetry on his blog, The Man with the Blue Guitar.

Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a "minimum" poem.

NPWM: "...write a poem rooted in 'weird wisdom,' by which we mean something objectively odd that someone told you once, and that has stuck with you ever since."

PSH: "If you were a tombstone tourist and could visit any burial place or shrine in the world, where would it be? Who would it belong to? Someone famous or obscure? Write a poem about one grave in particular." (Lara Dolphin)

I wasn't able to combine all three prompts, so I wrote two poems. The first is in response to the Poetry Super Highway prompt. The inspiration came from the phrase "whistling past the graveyard," which of course means to act like you are facing your fears when in fact you are barely containing them. I wondered what it might be like to whistle past the grave of someone famous for their whistling, especially a singer or musician. I thought of several songs that famously feature whistling. One that crossed my mind, which I haven't heard in decades, was the UK novelty song "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman" by Whistling Jack Smith. The entire tune is whistled rather than sung. Fortunately for Mr. Smith, he is still very much alive at 78. Then I thought of the middle of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" where he bursts into whistling, and some more recent tunes like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin (who is still around) and "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn and John (ditto.) But finally I settled on the late great Otis Redding's "(Sittin' on the) Dock of the Bay." I don't know if Otis's gravesite is that high on my bucket list, but I've always admired his music, and created this little fantasy around it:

Whistling Past the Graveyard
 
I was always fascinated by Otis,
who died so young in a plane crash,
just at the height of his fame.
He gave Aretha Respect,
and urged us to try a little tenderness,
but called himself Mr. Pitiful,
and told his girl he’d been loving her too long.
 
I dreamt I walked past his grave in Georgia,
where his father and son were buried too.
It was spookier than I expected,
with barren trees and overgrown weeds,
and I whistled to keep the chill off my spine.
I whistled the closing notes from
the last song we ever heard from him,
“Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,”
a meditative, quiet tune that sounded
like he’d written his own epitaph.
 
Then I thought I heard that whistle echo
back to me, like a call and response,
and the chill came back.
Maybe I should have just sung a sad song,
like Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa….
 

I combined the other two prompts by writing a "minimal" form poem (a double senryu) about a piece of advice a former coworker gave me which I didn't really understand till years later. When you work for the government (or at least the agency that I worked for), it seems more often than not that the only reward you get for competency is more work.

Wisdom
 
My old mentor said,
“Never become competent,”
before she resigned.
 
Now I understand
as I sit on a mountain
of new assignments.