Turpsik writes:
I have decided to
publish some poems by young poets. Please see my Reader's Poems page. Thank you for all the poems you have sent me, but please don't send me any more, as I have no room for them.
As a well-established poet, and acknowledged
authority on fishing sagas, I naturally carry all my rhymes in my head. If,
however, you are a cub or a kitten or a kid, you may need to resort to a
rhyming dictionary - and if you don't have one, you can make one.
You can only use it for one-syllable words, but it’s better than nothing.
Take a word like "stink". Remove the initial consonant(s) – "st"
– and then substitute all the others in the list below, and see which letters turn it into a proper word, and which turn it into gobbledegook.
(blink, brink, chink, clink, drink etc are the good ones.) And don’t forget the one that begins with just the vowel.
("ink")
B, Bl, Br
C, Ch, Chr, Cl, Cr
D, Dr
F, Fl, Fr
G, Gl, Gn, Gr
H
J
K, Kl, Kn, Kr
L
M
N
P, Ph, Pl, Pr
Qu
R
S, Sc, Scr, Sh, Shr, Sl, Sm, Sn,
Sp, Spl, Spr, Squ, St, Str, Sw
T, Th, Thr, Tr, Tw,
V
W, Wr
X
Y
Z
05 May 2007 18:48:46 +0100
MALLEMAROKING
Bitter the season, long are the nights,
Lit by the glimmer of ghostly lights.
Ice in the rigging, ice on the deck,
Frost on the tiller, snow down your neck.
Mallemaroking, mallemaroking,
Sing as you keep on shov’ling and stoking.
Fog all around us, misting the mast,
Pack-ice surrounds us; now we’re stuck fast.
Laughing at danger, we drink a toast,
“The source* of the fish! The sea, our host!”
Mallemaroking, etc.
The cold or the hunger? Which will it be?
Freezing or starving, who’s last, you or me?
A drink for the victor, some shrouds for the rest,
We scoff at the risks, it’s what we do best.
Mallemaroking, etc.
*Some versions have this as "sauce".
ODE
TO A FISH-BONE
White as the salt that the sea leaves behind,
The bones of the bogfish I finished last week;
Stripped of its flesh, it’s segmented and spined
The snow’s falling fast and the outlook is bleak.
Hunger, I find, tends to sharpen the pen
The larder is empty, the barrel is dry;
The bones of the bogfish the only thing left
I write and write and then -
Clouds start dispersing, the sun climbs the sky,
When spring returns, I’ll feel strangely bereft.
THE JAPEGRIN ANTHEM
We shall replace what we have lost,
We don’t give up, or count the cost;
We don’t forgive, we don’t forget,
We never make an idle threat.
So fear each wand, and fear each boot,
And know that we are resolute.
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