Daniel Galef: Seasons’ Greetings
Happy Boxing Day Eve, Happy Feast of Anastasia,
And Day of Awareness for Wernicke’s Aphasia,
Happy Takanakuy (of conflict resolution),
And happy anniversary to the Taiwanese Constitution,
Happy birthday to Newton,
And, though it sounds trite:
Happy Malkh to the Nakh,
And to all a good night!
(Each occasion listed here occurs on the 25th of December.)
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Gail White: Winter Solstice
We know the drill. The world is not
eternally benighted.
We know the light is coming back,
yet still we get excited.
Perhaps we’ll get that miracle
we lost before we found it.
Let’s drag a tree inside the house
and hang red balls around it.
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Martin Parker: Dress for Success
The breezes blowing up each kilt
have little heed for what’s beneath.
They chill Love’s claymore to its hilt
and freeze it, useless, in its sheath.
While those with smaller blades, the noo,
should keep them covered. Then they won’t
find each little Skean Dhu
has now become a Skean Dhon’t.
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L. A. Mereoie: Breaking Point
‘Pottery Throwing For Beginners’
- Book Title
When life is full of deep dark holes
Then let off steam by throwing bowls.
A really fine ceramic fling
Will set the spirits all a-wing
For those who have the itch to pot
Find joy in each successful shot –
But if you fail with wheel and glaze
Fire on at rather different clays!
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Brian S. Lee: Glass Octopus
Curious creatures are glass octopi,
Their small transparent heads an oddity,
A quirk, of submarine biology.
They float and forage deep down in the sea
Where light can’t reach their floor’s geography
Or penetrate their glass periphery,
Fo in the dark they're not ashamed to be
On permanent display internally.
https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2021/07/15/glass-octopus
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Bruce McGuffin: Late Night Musings Of A Free Jazz Musician
Unbounded by convention
In free-jazz music sessions,
I make this old horn wail.
Forget those chord progressions.
I miss the rhythm section,
And the way that I played with 'em.
You can't have syncopation
If you don't have any rhythm.
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Talbot Hook: For Genghis Khan
Herein lies the Mongol lord,
The Greatest Khan of Golden Horde,
Swallowed up by yawning Time –
Like those of every age and clime.
No man could outmatch your lust,
Nor China’s Wall oppose your thrust:
While scholars trace your ontogeny,
We’re drowning in your progeny.
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Martin Elster: A Masculine Superpower
All females want a fellow who induces her to laugh.
It says so in her profile just below her photograph.
So must I sign up for a course in stand-up comedy?
A bit one-sided, I must say, is what it seems to me.
Why can't the girl make me laugh? Yes, that looks a valid question.
And yet, there does appear to me to be an odd suggestion
I should possess some superpower that makes all females chortle.
But if I don't? Then I am damned, for I am merely mortal.
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Felicia Nimue Ackerman: No Frigate
“What, oh what, will save our boys from toxic masculinity?
. . . A few years ago, as a freshly minted English professor,
I thought I’d found the solution: Emily Dickinson. I’d teach
a class, composed entirely of men, about a reclusive
female poet . . . One student described Dickinson as staging
‘a rebellion against beauty standards’ [and beginning] a
proto-feminist effort to redefine looks.”
- From an opinion column in The Boston Globe
There is no Frigate like a Verse
To take us Lands away,
Provided readers focus on
The things the verses say,
Refraining from reducing them
To tedious cliché.
The student’s clunky rhetoric —
Gadzooks! Egad! Oy vey!
