The Duck
Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or a pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups!
The Purist
I give you now Professor Twist,
a conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."
Ogden Nash, Custard and Company, poems by Ogden Nash, selected and illustrated by Quentin Blake, Little, Brown and Co., 1980.
I love it when my friends surprise me with an unexpected talent or a quirky new interest. My longtime friend and former roommate, Wanda, did just that when she recited from memory "The Eagle", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson one day when we were together. She had decided to memorize some of the classic poems, just as her mother had as a girl. She was working on Joyce Kilmer's poem, "Trees" also.
Reciting poetry in front of the classroom recalls to us Laura Ingalls Wilder stories and other images of long ago days. Can't you just smell the chalk dust?
Now days we don't have to remember anything in particular; even phone numbers, our own or those of our nearest and dearest; not when we carry the sum of the world's knowledge in our pocket or purse! But our memory is a prodigious thing and it should be exercised.
I've memorized a few poems in my day, but the poems I've committed to memory aren't quite as uplifting and erudite as Tennyson and Kilmer. Ogden Nash fits the bill for me and the two I've shared above have rattled around in my brain for years. It's surprising how often I pulled them out for amusement--I'm always amused and sometimes others are as well!
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