“Untitled” [Pronunciation Poem] by Anonymous* [w/ Audio]

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead -- it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for pear and bear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward.
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five!

* This poem has come to be attributed to a T.S. Watt with a date of 1954. However, the broad divergence of titles and lack of other publication information suggest the alternate possibility that attribution was invented after the fact and has just been mindlessly copied across the internet. I don’t wish to cheat T.S. Watt, if he or she was an actual person who wrote this clever poem, but I also don’t wish to contribute to the spread of false information that happens regularly across the internet. Hence, this note.

Note to Self [Lyric Poem]

Allow me to make a
Socratic suggestion:
That you pursue the lowly
Art of the question.

Showing you love knowing
More than you love learning
Shows only that you're not
Discerning, and lack requisite
Yearning to find the Truth.

Swimmingly [Lyric Poem]

Moving at a glide --
No strain, no effort,
Rolling side to side,
No lord or escort.

Things are going SWIMMINGLY.

At Harbor [Lyric Poem]

A stiff line of ships
Stands in the harbor:
Neither rise nor dip -
Just anchored torpor.

Is a storm coming?
Will ships be unbound?
Will waves be drumming,
Or lost be all sound?

If a ship snaps loose,
Will it reach the sea
To become a recluse,
A ghost ship riding free?

“The Knight’s Tomb” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge [w/ Audio]

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be? --
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone, -- and the birch in its stead has grown. --
The Knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust; --
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

“Feeling for the Farmers” by Li Shen [w/ Audio]

Hoeing farmer, as heat haze roils,
His flowing sweat waters the soil.
All those who know food on a plate
Should feel each grain comes of that toil.

NOTE: The title of this poem (悯农, or Mǐn Nóng) is often translated as “Toiling Farmers,” though “Compassion for Farmers” or “Pity Farmers” would be closer to the literal translation.

“The Snow Storm” by Edna St. Vincent Millay [w/ Audio]

No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.

Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.

Dystopian Desolation [Lyric Poem]

A road lined with burnt out junkers,
And garbage fires 'round which hunker
Cold souls sitting in drizzling rain --
That rain, that rain, their eternal bane.

Blue skies are a distant memory --
Except for in every reverie
That denies claustrophobic skies
The main villain role - e'er reprised.

Where's our long-lost hero, the sun?
Have stout clouds got him on the run?
Or maybe our hero 's bleeding out;
Its feeble showing leaves room for doubt.

“Wild Nights – Wild Nights!” (269) by Emily Dickinson [w/ Audio]

Wild nights -- Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile -- the winds --
To a Heart in port --
Done with the Compass --
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden --
Ah -- the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

Winter Malaise [Lyric Poem]

One bitter winter afternoon --
Locked under skies so low and gray --
The city slowed in cold cocoon
As what verve remained slid away.

And then the clouds, they broke apart,
And frozen souls began to thaw.
But some needed not the sun's kickstart
To free themselves of winter's maw.

What was their secret? I wish I knew.
To be happy sans the skies of blue.