Three Poems

Three Poems
Svitak, Adora

Sharpshooter's spectacles
Proud brass buttons
Shortages and heavy-caliber rifles.

Gray, gray linen shirt
And a Springfield Rifle tall;
Decorative buck tails are trifles.

Light cavalry saber that glints in the sun.
Who knows what it could have done.

It's funny but kids like the big guns best.
They play on the wood axle shields
And turn the iron-banded whells.

Pow! Pow! go the guns
And the ironclads last;
A voltigeur's fight, and the Civil War's past.

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I believe that that poem needs some explanation. If you're wondering about all the weird Civil War specific weaponry I included in it, it was because the class activity was to use specific language from reference books to write a poem. My book was about the Civil War.

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In the depths of Rajasthan
In the shadows of Ranthambore
On the turf of the Gobblededook,
A raven croaked and sped off to the shore.

My mother told me to stay away
From the Gobblededook and his ire
But that had always been my dream--
And such dreams never tire.

At the door of the Gobblededook
A door an evil black like coal,
I trembled and I knocked and then--
The Gobblededook ate me whole!

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If you're wondering about the "Rathambore" and "Rajasthan", Rajasthan is a state of India and Rathambore is a tiger preserve in Rajasthan that I read about in Time magazine. We were supposed to choose words that we liked from an article that we liked and use them in a poem.

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To be eleven, oh so grand,
And high-and-mighty, vorpal;
To lord it over wee bugflies
And have no lack of torpor;

Stare at grass and daffodils
And bees that rumble-bumble;
The snakes that crawl, and stove the kettle
For squat birches that do sing

Shall welcome thou, and didst
Eleven is too, certainly
of certainty,
Peas Porridge Hot will solve it all,
Now listen to your mother's call.

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This was actually the first poem that I wrote of these three. In this class activity, we listened to the poem "Jabberwocky" and came up with words that we liked the sound of. Some of my words, as you may have guessed, were "Peas Porridge Hot", bugflies, and kettle. (Bugflies, by the way, is not a real word).