Collage Degree

I was just blowing up a balloon when
Italy won a soccer match
and Abraham Lincoln gave a speech
concerning railroad law. Then
Chairman Meow mad a cameo appearance
on Tahitian TV to discuss Titian's
use of shadow, and naturally
an abandoned ship sank off
and on an Aleutian island.

The phone rang virtually,
and gunpowder was invented.
Milton wrote a line with
an inverted hand while
Joan of Archimedes developed
a crush on a dark-haired
Viking. Frederick Douglass
scowled, and I have no idea
what I did with the utilities bill.


hans ostrom 2015

Weather Forecasts That Are More Than Unpleasant

Before I launch into the subject at hand, I must mention a new blog I like, Poefrika:

http://poefrika.blogspot.com/

Some nice postings there, and the person has multiple blogs. He just posted a very witty short poem by Amiri Baraka.

....In less exciting news, I've always been attracted to the patter and rhetoric of weather-persons, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the weather-persons on TV often have to invent weather-variety where there is none. They also often use the term "sun-breaks." In California, the same phenomenon is called "cloudy."

I played around with slightly more sinister forecasts:

Tomorrow calls for rain, followed by urine in the afternoon. (This is probably too unpleasant to be funny. Or just unfunny.)

Thursday looks like patchy morning fog, followed by a rash over your entire body in the evening hours.

By this time tomorrow, we can expect Hell to be cooler than Earth.

Partly cloudy in the afternoon, with absolutely no chance of meeting that special person with whom you might like to spend the rest of your life.

Snow in the higher elevations, turning into psychosis in the foothills.

A slight chance of rain, but no chance that your roommate will bathe within the next 10 days.
********

This morning, a colleague reminded me that Abe Lincoln, self-deprecatingly, once said, "By the time you're 35, you've earned the face you have."

This is a roundabout way of saying that I hope tomorrow brings you weather you enjoy, whether (nyuk, nyuk) you think you've earned it, or your face, or not.

A Poem By Abe Lincoln

Here's a poem by President Abraham Lincoln:

To Rosa—

You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not—
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—
Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Teach your beau to heed the lay—
That sunshine soon is lost in shade—
That now's as good as any day—
To take thee, Rose, ere she fade.

Apparently Lincoln wrote this poem in 1858, for the daughter of a hotel proprietor.

As a writer, Lincoln tended to cut to the chase. The Gettysburg Address is a model of concision. The thesis of this one is pretty clear: "Rosa, induce your boyfriend to marry you--soon." "Pluck the roses ere they rot" delivers a punch. We're accustomed to seeing roses fade in poetry, but "rot" is less familiarly poetic in a poems comparing roses to women. Lincoln's legendary gloominess is apparent, too: "You are hopeful, I am not--." --And this was before the death of children and the disastrous early years of his first term as president, when the Civil War looked hopeless for the North, the abolitionists believed him to be too soft on slavery, and his Cabinet was a pit of snakes. (Gore Vidal's Lincoln is one of my favorite historical novels.)

The poem appears in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Brasly. It also appears online on U.S. government sites.

I wonder how soon (or even whether) Rosa got married after reading this poem. I wonder what kind of poetry George W. Bush writes--or reads.