Continuing the theme of Good Stuff Spotted on Mastodon, this comes from Natasha Jay:
There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And Haikus confused.
Category Archives: Poems
Cross-format poetry
All the world’s a garden centre
All the world’s a garden centre
And all the men and women merely customers.
They have their checkouts and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His visits being seven ages.
First, the infant,
Yelling and crying in his all-terrain stroller.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his gameboy
And scowling morning face, bored by all he sees,
Until the animatronic reindeer arrive in mid-September.
And then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
With a woeful text to his girlfriend about
How his mother had to stop on the way.
Next, the influencer, seeking a sausage roll
And a power tool for his next ‘unboxing’.
Then the PR consultant, now behind the stroller,
Feigning an interest in his wife’s roses;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
To the retiree, whose rose garden is his pride and joy,
His wife mostly absent at the golf course. Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and such oblivion
That you take the bus to the garden centre to shop for clothes.
Ottery St Mary
We were passing Ottery St Mary, Devon, on our travels, and were pleased to see a sign to a pottery. Yes, there’s a pottery in Ottery. I started to consider its likely back-story…
There once was a lady from Ottery
St Mary, devoted to pottery.
If she saw a vase,
Wherever she was,
She’d say, “In my collection that’s gotta be!”
Well… you don’t expect anything too deep while I’m on holiday, I hope?
I like to think that the pleasing name comes from there being a lot of otters around, so making the area particularly ottery, but in fact the town lies on the River Otter. Confusingly, there’s also a River Ottery in Cornwall, but I can’t discover that either waterway is particularly known for its otters… in fact, the River Otter, according to Wikipedia, is unusual in having the UK’s only known breeding population of beavers.
They probably settled there just to confuse people.
Hiawatha’s milkman
Now I seize the empty bottles
Take them to the moonlit doorstep
Bid them journey safely onward
Ponder where the gods will take them…
Leave them there beneath the starlight
Leave them there beneath the doorbell
Turn the latch upon the door lock
Climb the stairs to sleep and wonder.
Then the midnight milkman cometh
Creeping o’er the crunchy gravel
Coming to the moonlit doorstep
Coming with the reinforcements.
Bottles new or long-recycled
Bottles young or aged with wisdom
Some have seen a thousand breakfasts
Seen a thousand frost-free fridges
Sat there on the kitchen table
Sat there by the coffee-maker…
Sat there on our autumn doorstep.
Then the milkman, bending over
Clasps the empties to his bosom
Takes them to their waiting transport
Takes them to their future breakfasts
Where, renewed, refreshed, replenished
Sitting by the coffee-maker
Do they talk of where they came from?
Do they tell of other kitchens?
Household feuds, excited children,
Life around the morning table?
Frothing latte, steaming porridge,
Milk with cookies, tea for comfort?
Do they speak of years of service?
Doorsteps grand and thresholds cozy
Meals they’ve seen, and parties hosted
Kettles boiled while crumpets toasted?
Ere their daily task is over
Ere the rinse, and then the doorstep.
Now the milkman, bending over
Clasps the empties to his bosom
Takes them to their waiting transport
Takes them to their future breakfasts…
QSF
Squelching in the Rain
After Rose and our fluffy-pawed spaniel Tilly came back from their walk across the muddy fields this morning, Tilly composed the following and asked me to share it, because it might help other canine readers to know they are not alone.
A Muddy Spaniel’s Lament
Rose’s supposing my toeses need hosing
Shows Rose is supposing erroneously.
‘Cause nobody’s toes can need quite as much hosing
As Rose is supposing my toeses to need!
Legacies
I remember, from childhood, a parody of Longfellow’s verse, which always amused me:
‘Lives of Great Men’ all remind us
As we through their pages turn
That we too may leave behind us
Letters that we ought to burn.
Some years ago I was trying to come up with a version for the modern age, and I stumbled across it this morning:
As you scoff at simple errors
In some ‘Great Man’’s last spreadsheet,
Lurk within your email backups
Attachments you too should delete!
Mmm. Perhaps that was best consigned to the digital flames as well.
Ode to a blustery winter campsite in the Dordogne
It’s good to know,
As the north winds blow,
That there’s plenty of eau,
And the eau is chaud.
Roses are red
I came across a thread on Twitter with geeky poems on the ‘Roses are red…’ model. So here’s mine:
Roses are #ff0000
Violets are #0000ff?
I think violets should be
More like #ee82ee
Don’t you?
Mmm.
Poetry Reading
A mistake reading poetry at night, I find,
but not for fear of sleepless angst
nor yet of haunted dreams.
Good verse needs concentration,
yes, and coffee.
Bedtime is for prose.
Brevity is the soul of wit
There once was a man from the sticks
Who liked to compose limericks.
But he failed at the sport,
For he wrote ’em too short.
From Wikipedia.
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember, with advantages…
Richard and I have been playing with flash cards as a way of learning things.
The great thing about an electronic implementation of the old ‘question on one side, answer on the other’ idea, is that it can make smart decisions about when and how frequently you should be presented with a particular card. Things you find easy to remember need only occasional repetition, while those which are new or more challenging need more regular viewing until they stick in your memory. When you see the answer, you just say whether or not you got it right, and how hard you found it.
Richard wrote a little while back about using this model to learn a reading he had been asked to give at a wedding. I’ve always liked learning poetry or bits of Shakespeare, but often find that large chunks will flow easily while there are one or two lines I always forget. Could this be the solution?
One of the popular flashcard systems out there is an Open Source one called Anki, created by Damien Elmes. It has Windows, Mac, Linux and Web clients, plus Android and iOS (though these don’t yet work on the latest version). And there are various ways you can get decks of cards in and out. The user interfaces are rather quirky, I find, and even the web sites can be confusing to navigate, but the underlying system works fine.
It’s easy to find plain-text versions online of most things I want to learn, so I wrote a little script called poem2anki which will take a text file containing lines of poetry (or prose!) and convert it into a file suitable for importing into Anki.
A question:
and the answer:
It will create these for all the lines in the poem, but you’ll quickly find you’re only tested on the ones you find difficult to answer.
You can find poem2anki here if wanted.
Seeing Venice a different way
In the past, we’ve just been casual tourists, but this time I felt we really got to the bottom of Venice.
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