Margaret Kollmer Poems

Dear Diary.....Told you last month about my visitors
from the States. Cousin John and wife Anne who
are members of Earthwatch and both have
Ox.Ph.D.’s.(Degrees don’t bother me much
...

In the late 1980’s Willy Whitesod’s father, the former Willem Terre’Blanche (trans. White soil, or sod) departed his home country, France, to make Ireland his home. Soon after his arrival, he met and married a fair colleen and bore a son with such wondrous eyes that they would, one day, be likened to ‘piercing blow-lamps cutting through the blue-white haze of molten steel.'

Little Willy, as the child had been called, was unaware of his origins, as his Dublin born mother had died when the lad was but a tumbling tot. The former Aisling McGinty had been both feisty and gentle and had recounted many a vivid tale to her young son about the wee folk, making it a point to assure him that should anything happen to her, she would send him her own special little leprechaun to guard and care for him if ever he should get into trouble.
...

In 1927, my father, Arthur Dickens, arrived in South Africa with a nice, fat gratuity from the Indian Army in hand. He chose to go to Barberton to try his hand at farming but, without any knowledge of the variable weather patterns of this country, he lost the lot. From there, he went to Springs where he met and married my mother, Roma Crumplin, whose mother Maggie Shanahan had been a Rose of Tralee. He bought a piece of land for the equivalent of R100 and built what was then the sixth house in Springs Extension for R1500 but before they could take up residence, he was transferred to Van Ryn Deep Gold Mine where he obtained his Surveyor’s Ticket. To supplement his income, he joined the Rescue Team where he received a bonus of R5 a month.

In 1932 he was called out to the big fire at Langlaagte where the Underground Manager and four senior officials had been gassed. It was his job to remove the body of the Underground Manager.(Noblese oblige, if you please!) He also became the official guide for taking people on underground tours of the mine and once took some representatives from Castle Brewery. Upon his return to the Change House, he found a crate of beer waiting for him.
...

Be there e'er a beast so foreign
Who dare to hang a ragged sporran?

This one has a reply:
...

Reading about our best local columnist’s impending semi-retirement some years ago, I visited one of my former schoolgirl haunts determined to find the gift that he would most appreciate. I had in mind his very own supermarket trolley. Goodness knows, he’d hinted at this for long enough in his columns.

Naturally, zapping, zilching or stealing a trolley was out of the question so I took a stroll down to the Brakpan Dam which everyone knows is still the secret breeding place of the ubiquitous shopping trolley – examples of which can be found in the oddest places. Sometimes it is difficult to comprehend how a steel trolley can climb a tree, a mountain or a passing truck, but there you are. It happens.
...

In butter/olive oil, fry red onion pieces.
Add chunky Chorizo and neat chicken
Add concentrated garlic and ginger (if
too busy to chop yourself)
...

I was e-mailing a friend recently, giving her some information gleaned from my Mims (the doctor’s ‘bible’) concerning a recently prescribed medication. My friend hastily came back to ask where I had obtained my Mims which she knew to be unobtainable to the general public and only available to the medical profession. No trouble to me I wrote back, telling her quite openly, cos I'm an open sort of person, that I had snitched it from my doctor's surgery many years ago. Quicker than lightning she’s back again, asking if I wasn’t ashamed of myself because of all the patients who may have died because of me having the doctor’s Mims. Of course not, I replied; ‘specially as you can see how easy it is for a doctor these days, just paging through a little book and then looking down at us, all sort of profound-like and bang’s yer Auntie, all he has to do is write out a script, copying it from his Mims. (That he had to study for years and years is of little consequence to us Mims nickers, being proper know-it-alls like and all)

When I was little, a consultation invariably consisted of us having to stick out our tongue and say aaaah … after which the doctor would hammer our knees with a funny little hammer that he also used for other funny things and that was the end of the consultation. Oo…eee, ha ha ha ha ha ha...
...

The dictionary defines immortality as 'enduring fame or remembrance' and these are qualities to which most of us mortals aspire. The need for recognition lies within us all and it is probably just the thought of death itself that provides us with the inspiration or drive to establish ourselves creatively in the world in the hope that we will leave something of our enduring achievements behind us when we depart.

There are those who will go to any length to achieve this recognition, whether in this lifetime or the next. There are those who don't give a fig one way or another and there are those who would stoop at nothing to have their name and associated 'doings' go down in history. Many have been immortalised through music, science or even by their merry and sometimes highly dubious philanderings, but it is comforting to know that it is well within the reach of us ordinary, run-of-the-mill folk to attain our own immortality, bearing in mind that whichever means we use, our success, or failure, will ultimately be qualified by the measure of how hard we worked towards earning, if not 'enduring fame, ' then, at least, 'remembrance.'
...

An Irish stew, my grandmother Maggie Shanahan would say, was a white stew - pure as the tips of angel wings. And this is how she taught me to make it, cooked on top of the stove:

Use only neck cutlets; thick and juicy. (Don’t listen to the heretics)
Dust them lightly with flour. (The cutlets not the heretics)
...

He was an Irishman, fair and proud and true and he had a tale to tell. He was one Shamus Maloney, Chairman of the Society of Leprechauns in Cloca Morra and, in reply to a letter in the International Express, Shamus protested their reference to leprechauns as pixies.

He was disgusted, saying that a pixie was nothing but an evil-minded Anglo-Saxon spirit who wore Ali Baba slippers and sat on water-lily leaves and who was probably having an illicit affair with his neighbour, a dreadful garden gnome or, even worse, some horrid painted frog who did nothing but puff and croak all day.
...