The Sunday Poem

Every Sunday I post an original poem.

  • The Sunday Poem: The Cat Came Back and Back and Back and Back

    Hours Categories Music, The Sunday Poem
    Comments 1 Comment

    This is probably my kids’ favorite song. I didn’t write it, of course; credit there goes to a guy named Harry S. Miller, in 1893. But it’s one of those songs that won’t die. A lot of kids come to it via the singalong version in Rise Up Singing: The Group Singing Songbook, which is kind of the default carry-around folk fakebook used around campfires. Some kids of a different vintage might remember the Muppets version.

    As with many of the tunes that have gone through the folk process, the melody exists in many different versions as well. I am positive that the version I do bears little resemblance to the original. And of course, once I learned that there were a lot of different versions out there, I had to go out and scour the Internet for all the verses I could find. What I found far exceeded the cat’s official quota of nine lives. And then, of course, I had to add my own.

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  • The Sunday Poem: Ode to Code, a Geek Poem

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 21 Comments

    OK, this is for the geeks among us. In fact, it is geeky on many different levels. It merits explanation in advance.

    Last night, I was working on a game I’ve been messing with. It’s circular, so there’s a lot of Sin(a) and Cos(a) and incrementing arcs and stuff. I was up until 4am, in fact, and needless to say, when you do that you end up with dreams. Mix into this the fact that at the Cub Scouts this past week, the demo was of optics, and we saw white light broken into the spectrum, and the wavelengths of the colors identified (and blue is damn close to 440 nanometers, and the note A is of course at 440 as well), an article I read a year ago about how the vibration frequency of the universe is the note A, how the composer Schumann (who went insane because of syphilis and mercury poisoning) was driven mad by hearing the note A… well, soon you end up with a poem that mooshes it all together.

    Then, to top it all off, I wrote it in blank verse: iambic pentameter, with seven-line stanzas, and one extra coda line (alas, not 440 syllables — 290). The stanzas arose organically, but each verse really hated being in lines — words broken across lines, etc, like strands that shouldn’t be interrupted. So then I re-broke the lines to be in a sine wave. Because I could. They seemed to want to fall that way. Eerie, huh? 🙂

    So finally, you’re left with a poem about, well, making games. And one I am tempted to annotate with Wikipedia links…

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  • The Sunday Song Lyric: Shannon

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 3 Comments

    I don’t have a recording of this one, so you’ll just have to read it as verse. It’s a story song, really, so in that sense a lot less like the more imagistic poems I have tended to put out there lately.

    Shannon

    Takes a lot of elbow grease to get the stains from the counter
    Residue of hamburgers and quickie lunches
    Shannon’s Diner charges a dollar for a hamburger
    And chances are Shannon herself makes it
    At fifty-four she flips her burgers and hates it

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  • The Sunday Poem: Eves

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 3 Comments

    Eves are potential: the pendulum at its farthest swing,
    The wave as it curls, the indrawn breath, lowered lashes.
    They accrete importance, become more the thing than the thing,
    Surrounded by lights, by costumes, icons, belled sashes.

    The days themselves are rushes, crashes, madness,
    The ebb and flow of family, feasts, and fastness.

    But eves — eves are frozen, out of time, still and somehow sad —
    An endless moment of anticipation you had, but never have.

  • The Sunday Doggerel

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 13 Comments

    When I named the company Areae
    I picked a name you can barely say.

    And in truth it was no surprise
    When others started saying Areae…

    But even then it seemed to me
    That most would call it AreaE.

    But really… who cares? Odds are
    You’ve typed it and read it so far.

    Or typoed it, at any rate. 🙂