Versifying

The Sunday morning pundit programs are all being pre-empted by really boring blizzard coverage (how many different frozen reporters standing before an empty street  with snow blowing around in the background do we need to see to understand it’s cold outside?). So consider this a versifying open thread. Share your favorite, share your own, or send photos of the view outside your window.

Here’s a piece I read a while ago and couldn’t get out of my head:

A Poem That I Wrote in a High Fever

You who are lengthening your lives
with the best doctors and the best medicines
remember those who are shortening their lives
with the wars
that you in your long lives are not
preventing.

You who are again screwing
the younger generations
and winking at each other
the winking of you eyelids
is like the chill of the swinging shutters
in an empty house.

–Yehuda Amichai
(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)

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July. Past the Fourth. In school, it’s the long slow slide: past the pool, past camp, past the games of catch-the-firefly. When you get older (when I got older) there was the gathering threat of High School Football practice — the American kind — in the August heat with forty year olds who are still living a dream, and not a good one, and not too well. You don’t want to hit until you hit someone, good, and they fall down. That it’s not proper or right or mature or anything you’d want to be is part of the pleasure.

Boxing, I tried it once or twice. But I’m too slow and my swing goes wide round, a rounder to the place between the hair and the ear, not straight out with a snap. Not to the nose, like I know it should (but I can’t make my arms behave). It’s not the same. Not like football. I was terrified until the end, and then I started to terrorize others and the fun started. And then, too soon, it ended. Not too much as a surprise after you’ve been worn down a bit but, at eighteen, it was a bit of a shock.

The slam. Feels good; let’s replay it. It’s time to slam again. This Thursday at eight o’clock in the evening, please. It’s on. (So to speak.)

A taste of the last round follows. Trust me, you want to read them.

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Because she not only points out to me [edited by author for clarity] things like this; she can recite it with the proper accent*. Just a taste:

Ike was a sturdy Skraeling hare
Disporteth through the Greene
Ik scoopen-up the fielden mice
And smacken ’em on the heede
And wo’ – oh wo’ the tragedye
That I ha’ comen to,
For I was caught by the Fayerye Queene
And now I am a goon.

Take it from me: this is a serious envy-generator for your average SCA bard, of which I modestly aspire to be, on my good days. Check it out…

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I beg your indulgence, all of you, for one more attempt at versification. This is a bad attempt at Spanish verse form: 8 syllable, abbaabba and consonant rhyme. I tried to make it sound the way classical guitar sounds to me; somber, almost sad, but with purpose. Dunno if it worked.

Again, our prayers and good wishes go out to the people of Spain.

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And you all get to suffer through it. My thanks for everybody who liked the Jabberwocky parody.

Moe

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Link to a couple of Tacitus posts and all of a sudden every site referral comes from there. I will therefore take it as a sign for… hmm, a poem seems appropriate, although I canna say why.

Thus, I give you a commemorative poem from my past blogging activity:

Instalanchy
(With apologies to… come on, everybody knows the poem I butchered.)

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