[R. S. Gwynn]

How pleasant to know Mr. Motion,
Whose name tells you all that you need;
He's a great white aswim in the ocean
With lesser fish on which to feed.

He has a reserved spot to park in
And plaques to mark places he's been;
He's a better man surely than Larkin,
Who was racist, misogynist, mean.

As the Laureate he was no greater
Than those who'd stood in the same spot,
No worse than the early or later--
Dryden, Tennyson, Hughes, the whole lot.

His task was to fitfully summon
The Muse for a marriage or birth.
Let us pray for Ms. Duffy, the woman
Who now holds the worst job on earth.

[Julie Steiner]

How pleasant to know
Basho! Not a Donne or Pound—
just a milligram

[Seree Zohar]

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson! What fun
to walk with him in Oxford’s park,
we’ll be back home for tea before dark
with all of our logic undone.

Dodo stammers one day: Let’s meet Alice
who cannot control her flamingo;
there's Caterpillar, having a sing-o!
while the red queen screams in her palace.

He's scattering jokes like confetti;
dedicated Determinants to Vicky
[a circumstance rather tricky];
and photographed Dante Rossetti.

There’s a grin with no cat, in the trees.
Did the Jabberwocky capture the Snark?
But we’re all home for tea before dark.
For now Alice is snuffed. More scones, please?

[Martin Elster]

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Strand

How pleasant to know Mr. Strand.
Can you see him there roaming the beach?
Where he is, he’s the absence of sand,
A volume the sand cannot reach.

As he’s walking, his form parts the air,
Which then flows to crowd into the space
That his body had filled. He’s as bare
As a baby at birth, and his face

Looks as calm as the eye of a storm.
A snowflake descends and dissolves
When it touches his tangible form
While, through space, the earth always revolves.

What motive does Earth have for flying
Through the silent and bone-chilling dark?
What reason do poems have for prying
Into life’s deepest mysteries? Ask Mark.

[Marion Shore]

How pleasant to know Mr. Whitworth,
admired by young and by old,
a jovial sort, with a wit worth
far more than its measure in gold.

He nips off to France for vacation.
He's bearded and beautifully shod.
He's part of the British invasion
on Erato--not Rocker, but Mod.*

For cricket he's quite the fanatic.
He eats costly cheese that is moldy.
He's occasionally melodramatic.
He's a star of the Speccie and Oldie.

He isn't a surfer or diver,
nor has he gone yachting at sea yet.
His dream is to capture the fiver,
to say nothing of the damn tea set!

If he's called to his Maker before us,
though some ask "What was all his shit worth?"**
I say let us all sing a chorus:
"How nice to have known Mr. Whitworth!"

__________________

*those old enough to get this, you know who you are!

**R.S. Gwynn

[John Whitworth]

Well that's very sweet of you, but I must insist that I am no longer a train-spotter for two reasons.

1. Train spotting is an activity proper to children like conkers or playing pirates. One grows out of such things.
2. The only trains worth spotting are steam trains, for sundry weighty reasons. Steam trains are no longer with us, not seriously with us. I mus admitthere is a part of me would like to own one of those model steam thingies that you stoke up and allow to chuff-chuff across the carpet. But only a part.

What I AM is a cricket fanatic and England have just won TWO games one after the other. Wow!

[Marion Shore]

never mind.

[Marion Shore]

I took out the 'trainspotting'. Though I did like the sound of it.

Hope it's more accurate now!

I play pirates! In fact, sometimes I think I am a pirate. ARGHH!

Conkers? I won't even ask...

[John Whitworth]

Thank you. I am honoured.

Conkers is a game played with the fruit of the horse chestnut. You drill a hole through it then put a string through it. Now you have your conker and you are ready to strike the conker of the enemy. You do this turn about until one conker is shattered. Conkers are oners or twoers or even seventy-foureres depending on how many enemies they have despatched. I think conkers can be baked in the oven or soaked in malt vinegar, though Doreen insists this is not permissible. There has recently been some GROSS cheating among the fraternity. People have been filling their conkers with concrete or small brass ball-bearings or coating them with Superglue. This is quite disgraceful. The ice is breaking up on every side!

Recently the Health and Safety people have told headteachers to outlaw the playing of conkers in playgrounds because of the possibility of injury. Children can sit quietly and sniff the superglue instead.

[R. S. Gwynn]

John, in 1953 or 1954 my older brother received one of those Lionel steam-engine model trains. It performed fitfully, as I recall, but you did get a little bottle of tablets to drop into the smoke pipe of the locomotive to make the appropriate effect--probably something that's toxic to gasp nowadays. It's a shame that the reach of the toy builders of that age exceeded their grasp, but it was fun trying to jiggle the track to get a connection that would make it run. I can't imagine what the transformer from 220v to 12 DC went through to get things on track; 110 to 12 DC was bad enough.