How Many Poets Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?
Eschew the headlong thrust, but choose the screw,
That subtle swerve that Archimedes knew.
Let there be light by means of deft rotation
And delicately twisted penetration.
Five Feet
Iamb and spondee are trochees
(An anomaly some find amusing),
And anapest scans as a dactyl –
Poetry is perverse and confusing.
Dactyl falls short of dactylic
Eminence, since it lacks the essential
Third syllable. Thus only trochee
Manages to be self-referential.
Ode to My Rhyming Dictionary
Some rhymes are words you don’t hear every day:
This book alerts me that I’d be a curple,
A horse’s hindquarters, were I to say
That no word in the language rhymes with purple;
It sets me straight by showing me that month,
The name we give an interval of time
Of which a day’s about one thirty-oneth,
Can beat the rap of lacking any rhyme;
It gifts me with a golden rhyme for silver,
That precious color of bright drops of dew
Or moonlight glistening on a newborn chilver
Nursed by her likewise silvered mother ewe;
It takes me by the hand and guides me higher,
As to the very summit of the Blorenge,
Bids me survey Welsh landscape and acquire
That rhymester’s Holy Grail, a match for orange.
|