From Maragret Fishback’s Time for a Quick One.

Wishful Thinking

Two thousand years Europe has tried
To settle quarrels by suicide.
Will peace-on-earth, good-will-to-men
Ever hallow the world again?

Heigh-Heigh Fever

The peaceful countryside is pretty,
But I am partial to the city.

Brought up on straight monoxide gas,
I don’t react to new-mown grass.

Besides, commuting leaves me cold —
Commuters all look tired and old.

Their backs are bent, their legs are lame —
I live in town, and look the same.

Career Girl

Getting and spending, we lay waste
Our powers, whereupon we’re faced
With jobs, continually better.
This satisfies a real go-getter,
But I’ve a melancholy notion
All is not gold that’s called promotion,
And so I hope, before I’m through,
To eat my cake, and bake it, too.

Reunion at Rising Gorge

Bright college days have come and gone;
I toast them with a craven yawn,
And pusillanimously note
Your extra chin where all was throat.

Those hips are likewise on the make;
And children toddle in your wake
To call me Auntie, which I find
Repulsive to my girlish mind.

So may I wistfully suggest
For both of us, new friends are best?
You’ll doubtless feel the way I do
If you love me as I love you.

Revolt in a Flat

I shall stay in bed all day.
I am tired of making hay
While the sun shines. Let it rain.
Let it shine. My sullen brain
Needs a rest. I want to root
Here beneath my quilt and snoot
Capital. Nor wheel nor cog
Of progress shall dispel my fog.
I am sick of zeal and action.
What I want is stupefaction.

Creepy, Crawly

The so-called drivers who proceed
 At fifteen miles an hour deserve
Tickets as much as those who weave
 And loop-the-loop on hill and curve.

The snail’s misguided life is spent
 Precipitating traffic jams;
Because of him, mudguards are bent
 And skies are blue with hells and damns.

So please, indomitable cop,
Make Dopey either go or stop.

Fun on the Front Page

Raise the flag and fling confetti
For Joe DiMaggio and Crosetti,
For Dickey, Ruffing, Rolfe… The Yanks
Deserve a hearty vote of thanks.

Let all our hats on all our heads
Be doffed in honor of the Reds
As well. Hip, hip, likewise hurray,
No matter which team wins today,

No matter which club comes to grief,
It will afford us some relief
To see Page One display a score
That has no bearing on the war.

Moment Musicale

I want to vegetate and read,
And joyously repair to seed…
This burning itch to Get Ahead
Leaves much too little time for bed.

From Morris Bishop’s Paramount Poems.

One of Our Menaces

Ho hum, ho hum,
 I’ve a happy life,
I’ve a little sonny,
 A nice little wife;
I’ve a little money
 From a nice little store;
Ho hum, ho hum,
 I wish there was a war.

Life is very pleasant
 And always just the same;
I can call the mayor
 By his first name;
As a golf-player
 I’ve a low score;
Ho hum, ho hum,
 I wish there was a war.

My wife gives a party,
 It’s really very nice,
We have a little salad,
 Coffee and an ice;
I sing a funny ballad,
 The folks yell for more —
Ho hum, ho hum,
 I wish there was a war.

I’d like to loot cathedrals
 And hang men to trees,
I’d like to have a try at
 A few atrocities;
I’d like world-wide riot,
 I don’t care what it’s for —
Ho hum, ho hum,
 Let’s have a war!

The Wise Men

“Be Thrifty,” say the sages,
 “And put away your rocks,
For thus one’s green old age is
 Secure from wrecks and shocks;
Do not, of course, be sordid,
 But build against mischance;
Thrift always is rewarded!”
 (Except in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, Russia and France.)
“Be Loyal,” say the wise men,
 “To what we say you should;
The time may come that tries men,
 But all is to the good;
Though War is quite a burden,
 Prosperity and peace
Are loyal peoples’ guerdon!”
 (Except in Italy, Belgium, Poland, Jugo-Slavia, Turkey and Greece.)

I may not be so clever,
 But when the Wise Men crow:
“Always, forever, never,
 This thing or that is so;
The Truth is what I utter,
 World-wide, unchanging, whole!”
Well, I’m afraid I mutter:
 “Except in Africa, Asia, America, Europe, Australia, and the North Pole!”

The Exile’s Christmas

Today the sky is gray with snow
Over a town I used to know,
And memories on the snow drift down
Over an unforgotten town.

Ah, heaven, might I see once more
The dear paternal grocery store!
I hear, in wistful make-believe,
The merry din of Christmas Eve;
Again resound the shouts and sallies
Of voices tuned to windy valleys;
A sleigh stops in the village street,
And, stamping on his frozen feet,
Red Sim comes in, shakes snow from collar,
And tells the news from Pony Hollow.
Then silence, as we turn our chaws
In the slow orbit of the jaws.

Alas! I am condemned to dwell
High in an arrogant hotel;
I sit in my palatial suite
And hunger once again to eat
Beans and brown bread, black and hard,
Buckwheat pancakes fried in lard,
And dour plum puddings, citron-crested,
Indigestible, undigested.
Why can I not arise and flee
From all this sickly luxury?

Why can I not go home again?
It’s only seven hours by train.
Can I not bridge that little span?
To be quite frank, of course I can.
Instead, I join the band that sits
In the bright caverns of the Ritz
Gazing upon the Christmas folly
With sick and wayward melancholy;
We go to dine, lugubrious;
The dining-room is full of us;
In the rose-glimmering catacomb
We yearn for the rude walls of home.
“Go home, for heaven’s sake!” say you.
We never did, we never do.
The burdened memories crowd and troop.
A tear drops in the turtle soup.

From Ethel Jacobson’s Who Me?.

Conversational Chimera

You frankly begin
With “Needless to say —,”
Then proceed to tell me
Anyway.

But I dream of someone —
Don’t wake me, don’t —
Who, when it’s needless
To say something, won’t.

Brief History of Feminine Emancipation

From Adam’s rib
To Women’s Lib.

Worried Capitalist

Oh, what shall I put my money in?
Industrials? Bolivian tin?
What’s a good hedge against inflation?
Debentures? Gold? A combination
Of Building and Loans and blue-chip stock?
Or stash it away in a mattress or sock?
These jittery times, it’s hard to know.
Should I plan for a balanced portfolio,
Or would it be smarter to go and blow
The whole fifty bucks at Pimlico?

The Unprejudiced

Fair, always open to suggestion,
 Unbiased, though my views are strong ones,
I see all sides of every question —
 My side and the wrong ones.

No Golden Age

I rather think that Socrates,
Viewing today’s mediocrities,
Would ring for room service and, aghast,
Order “A double hemlock, fast!”

Unsung Genius

His fame is dim,
 His life unknown.
No wreath for him,
 No carven stone.
He lived, he wrote,
 He now is gone —
The tireless pote
 We call Anon.

Regrets

Tears, my glum repentant one,
 Mean you now agree
That sinning wasn’t half the fun
 You hoped that it would be.

Happy Birthday!

You’ll never be old —
As old, I mean,
As Thirty seems
To Seventeen.

Golden Eagle

O golden bird,
Daughter of the sun
And of perilous crags,
O soaring, burnished one,
My sight can barely
Trace you on the sky.

Yet how miraculous
Your huntress eye
That marks the slighest
Bend of a weed
Where a white-footed mouse
Is garnering seed
Too far from home.

A plummet, a swoop, a shrill
Half-cry in the throat,
Then the meadow is empty, still.
Once more pinions are spread
And the bronze bird takes flight,
Staring into the sun
That blinds my human sight.

Richard Armour’s Foreword to Ethel Jacobson’s I’ll Go Quietly:

Light verse is an exacting art, demanding technical perfection, precision in the choice of words, and a nimble wit. But these are merely tools. More important is the requisite attitude toward life and toward oneself, a sense of the comic, the ability to detect the incongruous and the absurd.

Ethel Jacobson is one of the best modern practitioners of an art that began, in English, with Chaucer. She is a light verse writer’s light verse writer, able to cram much into few words, well-versed as well as well-versified, respectful of the requirements of her craft. What she has to say is as fresh and unexpected as the way she says it. Hers is the sharpness, not of claws, but of a keen and observant mind.

She sees the defects of the human race, but merely records them without bitterness and without preachment. (“If you know a better race,” she suggests, “go join it.”) All through her work runs a genuine regard for people, animals, and nature, wild or tame. She is capable of high satire and sparkling fun, but the fun, almost invariably, turns on herself. This is not only the kind of poet but the kind of person Ethel Jacobson is.

Her verses, in the thousands, have appeared in leading national periodicals. Her rhymes have been collected — not calm and collected, just collected — in two previous volumes, Larks in My Hair, and Mice in the Ink.

Here, now, is another volume of bright, skillful lines in the best tradition of an ancient and honorable art.

From Margaret Fishback’s Who’s a Mother:

It’s a Promise!

May heaven help me not to bore
 My friends with talk of teething.
They’ve met such miracles before,
 Including even breathing.

They’ve seen their share of babes in bed,
 Some somnolent, some sprightly.
They’ve heard what Little Mary said,
 And oh’d and ah’d politely.

So I’ll be kind to kin and kith
 And mind my subject matter,
Unless they persecute me with
 Their own maternal chatter.

To a Small City Slicker

Dear little human dynamo
Perpetually on the go,
Your hummingbird vitality
Amazes and bedevils me.

With puckered brow and aching feet,
I chase you up and down the street.
God gave you something to be sat on,
But you must cover all Manhattan.

You’re bored, parading in your pram.
At large, you’re happy as a clam.
Oh, for a yard to set you loose,
And let me rest on my caboose!

The Stag at Eve

When Little Tarzan eats his beans
And other unattractive greens,
I give the model child a cake
As a reward, for goodness’ sake.

But when he buttons up his trap
And won’t devour a single scrap
Of foliage, do I then deny
The stubborn apple of my eye
A sweet, and let him starve? Would you?
I think, like me, you’d give him two.

Thus do I keep the toothsome brat
Luxuriously pink and fat.
And if my views are in collision
With those held by our pediatrician;
If he condemns my soft technique
As reprehensible and weak,
I’d like to have him come to dinner
And try to feed the little sinner.

Who’s Getting Pushed Around?

I love my tadpole more than breath,
Or bread, or drink. I’d suffer death,
Or pain, or illness, short or long,
To keep him flourishing and strong.
But candor forces me to say
I eagerly await the day
When some poor kindergarten teacher
Will wrestle with the little creature.

Unnatural Phenomenon

The tots I mingle with are smart.
They know the alphabet by heart
Before they even go to school.
I’ve met no kindergarten fool,
No single backward child among
My friends’ extraordinary young.
As wise as Solomon and witty
As Sullivan, they talk so pretty,
Their parents quote them left and right.
Each child’s preposterously bright.

Now tell me why, with such a crop
Of geniuses, should brilliance stop?
Why is the intellectual colt
A creature predisposed to molt?
What makes the infant master mind
Leave all precocity behind?
What happens to these baby wizards
That they should grow up mental lizards?
When all are prodigies as pups,
How come so many dull grownups?

From Georgie Starbuck Galbraith’s Have One on Me:

Modern Liberal

He is a hot-eyed fellow who
Takes a most illiberal view
Of anyone whose viewpoint is
Not so liberal as his.

Serpents’ Teeth

You’re dedicated to parenthood:
You rear your offspring the way you should.
You tend their needs with a saint’s endurance,
And take out a lot more life insurance.
You wipe their noses and bind up their bruises,
You nurse their mumps and provide ’em with shoeses
And dental braces that leave you pelfless.
You’re in there pitching, dead-beat and selfless
And asking for more. For nobody ever
Had kids so adorable, cute, and clever.

And that “Whoosh!” you hear is the passing years.
And meanwhile, what of those cherub dears
For whom your hopes are as high as a steeple?
The little ingrates grow into people!

The Happy Ape

The happy ape, he does not weep.
Content with food, a place to sleep,
A mate or two, his jungle heath,
The sky above, the earth beneath,
He does not buy, he does not sell.
He wots no sin, invents no hell,
Does homage to no suzerain,
And makes no war for god or gain.

Nor clock nor creed can call him slave.
He does not toil nor spin nor shave.
He has no pants to harbor ants
In re finances or romance,
And needs no cocktails to escape
From fear or boredom. Happy ape!
Let someone prove, if prove he can,
The ape did not descend from man.

From Bard to Verse

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Had ye lived today on earth;
Had ye, Homer, Ovid, Horace,
This year raised your lilting chorus;
Had ye, Chaucer, Donne, and Byron,
Shaped your lays of fire and i-ron
In the present century,
I’d have never heard of ye.

These are times, believe me, Bards,
When a publisher regards
Poets as a fiscal bane.
Cookbooks sell; so does Spillane;
Even tomes on building muscles.
But, like buggy whips and bustles,
Poetry’s outlived its day.
Rhyme, like reason, doesn’t pay.

Bards, ye’d now be to the Trade
As pariahs. Ye would fade,
With the golden wealth ye minted,
Broke, unhonored, and unprinted!

Seeing the Bright Side

Though clobbered by trouble, grief, and woe,
I cling to the philosophical theme:
Someday I’ll look back on this, I know,
And laugh till my straitjacket splits a seam!

Let Sleeping Statistics Lie

Statistics show that many more people die
In bed than elsewhere, establishing thereby
A fact statistic-lovers can have no doubt of:
Beds are places the prudent will stay out of.

Double-Edged Saw

The early bird will catch the worm,
Or so the proverb likes to state.
The moral: wise birds rise betimes,
But even wiser worms sleep late.

Fundamental Fallacy

Utopia still will be far to seek
As ever it’s been, so long
As men believe they can strengthen the weak
By weakening the strong.

Barzun and Taylor (A Catalog of Crime) on The Widening Stain (1942) by W. Bolingbroke Johnson (pseud. of Morris Bishop): “An academic double murder in a library, solved by the semiyoung librarian heroine. The relationships are well drawn, but there are few physical clues and not enough sound work on the space-and-time question. What makes the book delightful is the witty narration, dialogue, and interspersed limericks.”

Ogden Nash’s Introduction to Richard Armour’s On Your Marks:

How much punctuation is just enough? E.E. Cummings sometimes used too much, Archy too little, both with prodigious results. But those of us who are neither unorthodox geniuses nor cockroaches will do better to observe the rules if we wish our written words to mean what we intend them to mean. I don’t know how many fat, greedy poodles or lazy, supercilious Persians have come into a handsome sum at the expense of a worthy and impoverished rightful heir because of a comma misplaced or omitted in a will, but I’ll wager more than there are apostrophes in this sentence.

Now that this simple guidebook is available there is no excuse for losing your way in the tanglewood of punctuation. Richard Armour is a master of his craft — ingenious, witty, and many-faceted — whose verses I have admired and envied for many years. Here he has given to one long known to editors as the most reckless and least punctilious of punctuators a swift and painless education in this essential phase of his profession. The rhymes are terse and memorable, the reasons clearly stated and easy to comprehend. No longer shall I ignorantly employ a — for a : or (\,) for [\,]. And I am happy to find that there is still a use for the *, which I thought had become obsolete after the court decisions involving Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer.

Richard Armour’s delightful little book of shrewd advice is just the thing for today’s generation of aspiring writers and not too late, I hope, for yesterday’s.

cacoethes scribendi by oliver wendell holmes sr.

 If all the trees in all the woods were men;
 And each and every blade of grass a pen;
 If every leaf on every shrub and tree
 Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
 Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes
 Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
 And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
 The human race should write, and write, and write,
 Till all the pens and paper were used up,
 And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
 Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink
 Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.

From Morris Bishop’s A Bowl of Bishop (1954).

for the tomb of economic man

“The Economic Man is dead.” — Peter F. Drucker: The End of Economic Man.

The Economic Man
 He went a crooked mile;
He made a crooked sixpence
 By economic guile.
He bought a crooked cat
 Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
 In an economic house.

The house has fallen in
 On Economic Man;
It seems the present tenant’s
 Totalitarian.
A fascist cat pursues
 A communistic mouse,
And they all fight together
 In the new collective house.

But Sociologic Man,
 Inheriting the mess,
Will serve the common welfare
 With social consciousness.
Cooperative cats
 Will fraternize with mice,
And we’ll all romp together
 In a social paradise.