Tag Archives: poetry blogs

Girls in Unsuitable Shoes

Men their hearts lose
To girls in unsuitable shoes.
Fire will always burn.
No lessons are learned
While the world, unconcerned
On it’s axis continues to turn.

I owe a debt to Kiplings’s “The Gods of The Copybook Headings” for line 3 of the poem:
“As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

The Poet and the Workman

Poet: “Why do you dig a hole my good man?”
Workman: “Because I can,
While those who are not able
Sit at a table,
Wasting time
Trying to make their verses rhyme”!

Poet: “I have a plan
To make my lines scan.
Kindly move your van
And I will be on my way
To versify the livelong day”.

“Workman: Why bless my soul
This poet droll
So intent was he on his goal
Of writing verse,
That the man’s fallen into that there hole,
To be a rhymer is most perverse”!

The General Will (a satire on the idea that “the people” are invariably right)

Only a fool
Can object to Rousseau’s rule,
For “the general will”
Can do no ill.

It is treason
To deny
That “the people” are guided by reason
And he who does so must die.

So say I
Until “the general will”
Does ill
Unto me
And we are no longer free …

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/General_will#Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

Rue

Waking to the alarm
He thinks on the charm
Of woman (not here).
Yet the imagined ideal
Does, I fear
So often obscure the real.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Girls ponder on jewels
While fools Misconstrue
What is true.
Hamlet will gather Rue
Ere the day is through.

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” it is, of course Ophelia (not Hamlet) who gathers rue.