And why not? for my very dust is laughing
For thinking of the humorous thing called life.
Barney Hainsfeather
IF the excursion train to Peoria
Had just been wrecked, I might have escaped with my life--
Certainly I should have escaped this place.
But as it was burned as well, they mistook me
For John Allen who was sent to the Hebrew Cemetery
At Chicago,
And John for me, so I lie here.
It was bad enough to run a clothing store in this town,
But to be buried here--ach!
Petit, the Poet
SEEDS in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel--
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens--
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure--
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers--
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?
Pauline Barrett
ALMOST the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife
And almost a year to creep back into strength,
Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
Found me my seeming self again.
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