Original Poetry – Page 2 – mountainbreakfast

Ben Franklin

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Another Poem Rejected by the New Yorker.

What is WRONG with them? I didn’t even get a sad-face emoticon. Nothing.

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Limericks

Ever write limericks? It’s not literature, for sure. But there was a contest once, so I wrote this.

On Being Challenged to Write a Limerick

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Challenge: Alphabetical Poems

Try this. Write a poem that uses each letter of the alphabet in sequence, allowing up to five articles and prepositions per verse, in lightface type. To allow five words (letters) in each line, A, B, C, and D are repeated at the end to make 30 words. Go for it. Here are four examples. If you can think of better word sequences, let me know!

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Nursery Rhymes

Here are a few nursery rhymes as I tell them.

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An Entomological Lesson

Little is known of the predators of blister beetles. But we can speculate…

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A Poem from 1983

I wrote this when my brother, Phil, and I were lamenting on things going wrong. It seems appropriate for Democrats now, and Republicans in a couple years.

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Well, many years ago, before computers and the internet, I wrote a short story about a man who carried an enormous length of garden hose up a mountain with the goal of starting a siphon to run water from a lake to his cabin below. His only friend, a water attorney (?!?!), warned him that stealing water could get him in a lot of trouble. But, undeterred by this cautionary advice, he proceeded to climb to the lake and start the siphon. Meanwhile, his friend cooked breakfast in the cabin below. By the time the hose was hooked up, his friend had set fire to the kitchen and lost control of his wits. Just when it looked like the cabin would be burned to ashes, the hose began blasting water, and he was able to save the house. This was the first of several short-short stories in a series that I called Mountain Breakfast, in which each tale involved cooking or eating breakfast in the wild. It was all about humans, all about nature, and all about human nature. I’m still at it, still hiking and thinking and writing tales, although they’re longer now, and not about eating breakfast.