“Resilience” Writing Contest: Share Your Story or Poem of Triumph Over Adversity
Watch Me Bounce is now accepting entries for its 2012 Resilience contest. We are looking for stories and poems(both real-life and/or fictional) and poems about “resilience,” or triumph over stress and adversity. Stories and poems can be about about characters coping with stress, anger or fear, steering through challenges. Themes Stories and poems can be about one or more of the following three themes: a. Surviving: getting through adversity b. Bouncing back from adversity c. Thriving: Bouncing Back and learning or growing from the ...
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January 10, 2012The Tempest
The Tempest By Jayanthi Manoj On the wet sands of an unknown island draped with strange sights, I sit beside my ruined ship and I write, “My Master! I adore you! You made me survive The Tempest.” A few minutes back under the turbid sky, I captained a deck with pride. A ship with fortunes for life sealed with my ego, gallantly rode over the tamed waves. I floated in a mood of arrogance and clinched on my closest pride, gently sailed on the feathery waves. The sound of destitute were queer, my pathetic pride perched on my peacock peak, hailed haughty smiles across infirmities. I jeered the poor, derided the low as I passed small ferries ...
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January 10, 2012Never Learn
Never Learn By Salina Tesfay My heart was pacing at what seemed like an inhuman rate. At that moment I had no idea whether I would survive. What I did know, was that my need to find the good in people had put me in that situation. Actually, my little brother’s drug dealing is what put me in that situation. Him and his friends, I wanted to change them, save them from dying on the streets. The funny thing is I thought I did. “I sto-, we stopped” were the words that fell out of Bo’s mouth and filled me with joy. I found plans on Bo’s desk, two days later, ...
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December 13, 2011The Singer and His Song
By Michael Shafto He could sing a little, that kid – he certainly could. In a strange way he was also very brave. He was two bricks and a tickey high with sandy hair, a tiny snub nose, vivid green eyes, and elbows and knees that stood out in his skinny arms and legs like the joints of a comic-book robot man. It all began some twenty years ago, one evening in the dormitory of a posh Jo’burg school. The dormitory had eighteen beds, nine on each side of ...
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November 20, 2011Something Predictable
By Simon Diamond Cramer Dawn breaks and drives an airplane-shaped wedge between us, tears us lip from lip and hand from hand, and I think we could have had more two more one more minutes seconds even would have been enough And when I find my flight’s delayed it’s time we could have used the extra minutes breaking into scanty hours we’d grasp and spin into new days and weeks together in our minds and then watch slip away just an hour just a minute just a second more just more it would have been enough it would have No. It would never be enough. We knew what we were getting into, saw the ticking clock before the very start, knew it would have to end like this and so I sit and ...
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November 12, 2011The Groundsman
By Linda Penhall St Dominic’s Anglican Church March 1953 As I deposited the last of the hymnals in their usual resting place at the back of the church (not one of my more regular duties), Mrs. Bancroft, the church committee chairperson, wearing her regulation tweed skirt and cream colored twinset, swept past me, nostrils flaring, eyes resolutely fixed on the vestry door. For some reason she's always disliked me, even though I'd hardly ever spoken with her. As she thundered up the aisle, I couldn't help thinking how irreverent and inappropriate the sharp sounds her footsteps created, and by the look of her, she wasn't ...
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October 16, 2011Armor
Armor by Gila Heller raw onions attended my father's funeral they sat in the back of the sanctuary and listened with bulbous ears to the eulogies by then I was accustomed to the stinging pain of onion eyes but I had never known the bitter aftertaste of death I started cooking because I loved food because my mother was always too tired to cook because I didn't want to live on casseroles made by well-meaning family I started cooking because the drugs that prolonged my father's life also had some nasty side effects and for weeks he couldn't swallow I started cooking because my father had loved food because I imagined that he had forgotten what it felt like to chew dinner instead of ...
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October 4, 2011Pain Bleeds Joy
Pain Bleeds Joy BY: Alyssa Atara Chouake A sound once was heard Along a bubbling stream An Antiphony of gurgling and sputtering A Bel Canto of burbling and frothing Not so much as Agraphia, but sorry to behold A babbling brook so wheezy Such a sound was heard By a kindly passerby Who took out a cough drop And plucked it into the river Staining the marble softness With red Antitoxin, with sticky antitussive A wheezy flowing voice now silenced mid-complaint By one with good intentions A babbling brook to silent lake And seeing the cause of his heartfelt actions A passerby heard nothing Who thought without reflection At least no more coughing
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September 23, 2011A Critique of “A Complicated Gift” by Maureen Dion
A Complicated Gift skyrocketed to the top of the list for Watch Me Bounce's contest entries mainly because the author, Maureen Dion, truly wrote from her heart. The story, told from the viewpoint of a grandmother raising her grandchild, is not a diatribe or list of complaints, nor does it preach values—rather, it manages to combine a visual, grabbing look at life while exposing some heartfelt lessons learnt through the experience of raising a young child. This is why we at Watch Me Bounce thought it important to give this true story the recognition it deserves, and help promote the resilience mothers, fathers and other caretakers maintain every single day of their busy productive lives. Two factors ...
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September 4, 2011Nonfiction Winner: “A Complicated Gift” by Maureen Dion
A COMPLICATED GIFT By Maureen Dion Toddler-breath is tickling my cheek. At first I think I'm dreaming. I'm in a sleep so deep it's like death, like I swallowed a fistful of Ambien, when suddenly there is an elbow in my eye and a chubby knee wedged into my stomach. A small body is climbing all over me. I awake with a jolt, a brain-slamming, oh-my-God awareness - SHE'S AWAKE! My three-year old grand-daughter, the little terrorist who lives with us, believes that 5:00 am is the beginning of her new day. For me, it's barely the ending of my yesterday. I am so not ready to begin this day. I am ...
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September 4, 2011