Saturday, March 24, 2018

Early Poems


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             1956

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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