Eggs, Bunnies and Fleas
Eggs and Bunnies
A while back Matt blogged of his attempt to explain the significance of bunnies, eggs and Easter (in that order) to bewildered Japanese people. [No permalinks - it's the 2002-03-31 entry].
We at desbladet like to think of ourselves as being at the forefront of linguistic and cultural confusion, so in honour of the occasion and in violation of our policy of not posting our own poetry we have perpetrated this haiku:
Bunnies in Springtime -
soon there will be more bunnies;
eggs make more chickens.
Of course, it's Autumn down-under, but I can't help feeling that having Easter in Autumn and Christmas in midsummer is the cultural equivalent of a stupidly and misleadingly literal translation.
And since we're doing sort-of poetry today (no poetry tomorrow, I promise! I've got silly Swedish stories backed up half-way to Bath) maybe this is a good time to plug Don Marquis's free-verse composing flea Archy. There's this flea, see, which is the reincarnation of a vers libre poet and which writes poems on the typewriter overnight.
What's surprising about this stuff is just how affectionate and skillful and still-funny it is - the collection I've been reading dates from the 1930s and last night I was reduced to helpless giggling by this poem. It's an interview - set and presumably first published at the time of Prohibition - with a mummified Egyptian king who's gasping for a beer and it really is much better than it needs to be to make its points, from the ritual exchanges of escalating but still friendly abuse - it opens
what ho
my regal leatherface
says i
greetings
little scatter footed
scarab
says he
and builds up from there - to the sustained metaphor of the Pharoah as the embodiment of dessicated thirst.
Or try the ecstatic rhapsodies of the cat Mehitabel who claims (implausibly even within the constraints of her fictional world) to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra:
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell
Normally I like to read poetry to myself in the voice of a West
Country yokel - except Shakespeare, who I read as a proto-Brummie -
but that clearly won't do for American verse. So I'm now using these
poems to get in touch with my inner New York taxi-driver - Walt
Whitman and Elizabeth Bishop, here I come!