Student Poetry This Project WR245 More Home		The Bat An Heroic Sestina Linda Appel Hero-like, my husband, a colossal naked statue, bestrides our bed and flails the toilet plunger in a duel with a toothy ravening bat which swoops around the room. It’s trapped inside the house and all three of us want it out. In fear I peek from beneath the sheets and echo its panicky cries which roused us minutes ago into this crisis. How to catch a bat? Well, later we knew it takes a tennis racquet, some net to peek through, but closest at hand is the toilet plunger, so that is the weapon of choice this midnight. How- so-ever, it fails, only forcing the bat to swoop lower and faster ‘til at last he sweeps out of the room. Its disappearance is scarcely a prize, since we know it still lurks somewhere in the house. We hesitate to continue the search, since we’re both nude and what if the neighbors see us this way, lunging like loonies around the room? They’re bound to peek into our windows this late at night.-- Excitement has peaked and we head to bed to try for sleep. I’m a Betty Boop, a squealing ditz, but my hero love, who plunged right in and fought off the danger, soothes my cries. Of course, sleep won’t come. We know that bat’s renewed its angry, evil vigil in our house. Next day begins the quest to find out how someone snags a bat. At work my hubby speaks with friends; at home I nurse my fragile mood by vacuuming.-- One, two, I see three bats swoop hugely up and down the stairs. Hysterical cries fill the neighborhood as I abandon the house and plunge down the street where a friend calms me, expunging my frantic fears with gin, and phones my hus- band who sets aside a true life-threatening crisis at work and journeys home to soothe me and seek the lair of mutant gigantic bat clones. He swoops into action, my hero, with monster-hunt plans he’s reviewed. But it’s a friend who plunges into the search and peeks at my houseplants on window sills. In the bathroom he swoops a towel over one tiny bat beneath a leaf. Miss Boop cries, “ Whew!” Linda Knowlton Appel was born in 1939. Raised in Alabama and Massachusetts, she has lived all around the United States. After many years as a science and business librarian, she has retired to concentrate on writing poetry. She has two children, two grandchildren and lives with her husband on the Willamette River in Oregon. You can read more of Linda's classroom poems by following the graphic link below.
	>	Insomnia by Linda Appel can be read here. Next 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 Copyright © 2005 Linda Appel All rights reserved. Spring Term 2005. Clackamas Community College, Oregon City, Oregon Web design by Doran Web Works.