© Their Prickly Pear Jam and Sour Grapes

Great minds discuss ideas.

Average minds discuss events.

Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Isn’t it kind of silly and yet also amazing to think that tearing someone down also builds up the person doing the tearing... Or, the person RIPPING another apart? If this was the 16th or 17th century, the narrator of this poem might have been burned at the stake or maybe been forced to wear a scarlet A on the bosom of her clothes because of the vindictiveness of the gossips we first learn about in the third stanza.

What we never know is her name or the man's name; she never says. But, that's unimportant because it could be anyone; right? What we do know about her is that she is single, that she writes, that she is Jewish, that she lives in a state that borders Mexico, and that she was aware she was being slandered. What we know about the man is that he is not Jewish, he lives in Canada in a place known for its plains, and that he probably listened to the gossip/slander.

Ooh, Ooh, ooh! Can we suggest the first order of business?? Open up a church and teach those bitches about the Proverbs and Psalms on gossip!!! Or, send them to court as slanderers and bullies and let them try to defend what they said. No, the reader doesn't know what was said, but whatever it was, it was unimportant. What is important is that the readers learn the gossips were envious, unhappy, angry, and/or jealous of the narrator and they attacked.

Gossip is stealing.

If false, it’s stealing a person's good character.

If true, it’s taking away a person's right to privacy and ownership of their own story.

© Their Prickly Pear Jam and Sour Grapes

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

We were an unlikely pair, my Goy(im) Toy and I,

Strolling across the desert border into Mexico on a

Warm January day from nothing more than sheer

Boredom and a desire for authentic native food.

There were fantasies to live before he returned to

His snowy western plains across my northern border,

And he wasn’t about to listen to any Ivory-Castle

Suggestions from others... Or, maybe he had already.

We may have appeared ridiculous through the cocktail

Glasses of the classless and the prejudiced minority;

We never let any catch me writing since they were so

Careful I’d never learn what they told him about me.

Of course they were all so perfect and enthusiastic in

Their scandalous gossip that their pathetic, worthless

Lives seemed right; and none thought much of the my

Writing, yet they couldn’t wait my words to criticize.

There was nothing subtle about their whining and their

Undermining of anything we did or anything I said;

How could it have surprised them to discover I knew

They all slandered me to my love, my peers, my friends?

(art: 

Top, Gossips, acrylic and watercolor crayon, 16 x20 inches, illustration board, by S. Giles
Bottom, GOSSIP, Acrylic on Canvas, 20 x 30 inches, by C. D'Aguanno)