Quail

 

Q is for….Qet

 

Qet?! Yup, that is the Arabic for cat, may or may not be the origin of the Latin cattus from which English cat  is derived. It came to mind because today it is raining cats and dogs here in Nadi. The mountains have disappeared, I can only see up to the palms that border the golf course and the road just beyond it. The rest is invisible whitemisty swirls. Maybe because of the rain,  the internet today is hard to pin down too, acting snooty - like a cat often does.

 

Now Q is a super serious letter, it makes me quail every time. It demands gravitas and earnest, painstaking labour. Like the ant that hefts loads larger than itself and stashes things away for the hard, rigorous winter that descends on the A-Z from Q to Z. But my mind is playing the grasshopper today, it refuses to hold onto any subject seriously for any given length of time. It’s leaping from word to word, nibbling at one briefly, then running its forelegs through the next one and then leaping off into a giant jump for another, quite unrelated subject. Quo vadis, O Grasshopper?

 

What’s happened is this – Joanne from Word Splash, a long-time friend, had mentioned Amanda Gorman. Of course that made me go back instantly to listen to her absolutely magnificent poem. For the nth or rather qth time -  Amanda and her poem never fail to amaze. And that one line where she recites “…quiet isn’t always peace” – it’s like the words have been etched on my soul from some earlier birth in quaternary times. So I wrote a response quatrain to it - it sulked because it thought itself too grand for  just four lines. I had to write a full fourteen to quiet it down. Here are the first -

 

Quiet is rarely peace, it’s the lull before the storm

it’s often prepping for war, reaching for the guns,

it’s the split second before someone explodes the bomb,

quiet isn’t quiet - it’s studying ammunitions.

 

But then the grasshopper flew off again, it doesn’t do serious at all. And I thought yeah, all this angsty woe-is-me witnessing yet another war and floods of refugees...okay, it’s not that I’m for violence or dictatorial systems of government or general cruelty and human rights abuse, I am NOT. But it’s not going to wholly demolish the global quest for nuclear disarmament and peace and justice and gender equality, if I don’t, just for once, post another of my whingy outbursts. So that was that.

 

Then the grasshopper landed on quarantine – stands to reason in covid times, right? I got as far as saying that Fiji has lifted quarantine rules for fully vaccinated travellers from 7^th April, provided they take 1) Pre-boarding covid test 2) Post landing covid test and 3) travel insurance covering covid…but Grass H. had no patience with that also and took off in a quantum leap.

 

As a last resort, I am going to talk about the Queens Road, which is the road I find myself on, going and coming everywhere in Fiji. It is actually a highway connecting Sigatoka in the south-west to Lautoka up north via Nadi. I travelled along the road going to the Garden, to the less edifying Lautoka factory and also to McDonalds last night for dinner. Not a fan of McD’s but heavens, was I glad to see a known face!  The grasshopper has hopped off again, really I might as well quit while I am ahead. Am I, though?! Never mind…

 

 

 

 

A-Z Challenge 2022