My first attempt at poetry
was in the third grade. We were given an
assignment – to write a poem on the subject “If I had a Hundred Dollars.” This was 1956 – Disneyland had opened the
year before, and one of my favorite TV shows was the “Mouseketeers” which ran
from 1955-1959. I was enchanted with
Annette Funicello. So my poem went like
this:
If I
had a hundred dollars
I’d go to Disneyland.
For
if I went there
I’d see my girlfriend.
I’d
take her by the hand
and go out for a date,
For
I’d be in California
and that’s a beautiful state.
As you can see, even at that
early age, rhyme and meter were important to me!
My next attempt at poetry,
again as the result of a school assignment wasn’t until 1965. I was in the top track in high school. That meant not only that we took Algebra I in
8th grade so we could get to Calculus by senior year, but that we
doubled up in English in 11th grade so we got to take an elective,
World Literature, our senior year. Part
of our reading assignment was Milton’s pair of poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il
Penseroso” (the happy man and the thoughtful/pensive man). We were then asked to write a poem in the
style of Milton. I decided to take that
pretty literally and wrote the following poem (the title then roughly
translating as “the realistic man.”)
Il Realite 1965
Come, lazy, false faced Jest,
The son of Mirth and all her loathsome kin.
How
much you all do sin,
And fail to face up to the final
test!
Find
homes within the dead,
Or give some fool your laughing
merriment,
Who
has a natural bent
For doing all the wicked kind of
things
That
all of you do bring,
And place within the most unwary
heads.
But,
hail! that blessed truer life,
Reality
and all its strife.
Though
seeming quite an ugly one,
‘Tis
better far than all that fun.
While
Beauty’s quite a lovely dream,
And
Laughter’s lots of fun, it seems
That
transitory is all they are
And
will not get you very far.
Come,
truest Life, the only good,
The
final goal for those who would
Belong
to earth, and sky and sun
And
care about not anyone.
The
fittest will survive, they say;
I
know it’s true, because, some day,
The
ones who laughed and fooled around
Will
find that they have all been downed,
And
stomped and squashed by those who knew
What
this cruel world was coming to.
For
work, work, work and think, think, think
Are
all to keep you from the brink
Of
deep despair and death, perhaps,
And
joining all those foolish saps,
Who
played around and didn’t care
And
so, none of them did prepare
To
live again another day.
They
never watched along the way.
So
work you should, and think you must,
Unless
you would return to dust,
For
doers are the only men
Who
will escape that rotten pen,
Where
other men are born and die
And
never do learn how to fly
O’er
that barred gate that leads to life
Who
does not want to stick a knife
In
each broad back and hairy head,
Until
he’s sure that they are dead.
For
in the pen Decay rules all
And
does make sure that all will fall,
And
never rise again to live.
This
is the life that Fun does give.
And now I will this statement make,
That fun is nothing but cultured
hate.
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