Librarian of Alexandria

2012-01-31

A Poetic Anecdote

My mother recently wrote a poem warning against eating her food—as she is not known to be a prolific cook—and posted it in the kitchen. It went like this:

He who eats here
Must trust his fate
To please his palate
And fill his plate
Sometimes there is
Sometimes there ain't
I'm not a cook
I like to paint

I responded to this abomination with a poem of my own:

I found the bane of Euterpe
    one dismal winter day
A poem so bereft of skill
    I thought my mind would fray
Into a million tiny threads—
    it would have been more pleasant
Than living with its memory
    as I do in the present.

For in the many brilliant years
    when poems were composed
No single dumb, ungainly fool
    had ever yet proposed
To write a poem with such a rhyme
    to make the muses faint
And throw decorum to the wind
    by rhyming "paint" with "ain't."