As my son was driving down the pike
a driver cursed him, “You dirty kike”
My son turned slowly and waved goodbye
calling out proudly, ‘Am Yisroel Chai!’ *
__________________________________
*In English: "The People Israel Live!"
This is the tale of Sarah Pike
Who lived in a cottage at Hangman’s Dyke,
Twixt Preston and old Burnblack town
She walked the byways up and down.
Travellers stopped to buy her pies
And kissed her hands with gracious goodbyes
Till a gentleman rider on his tall chestnut steed
Strangled her dead in his wicked deed.
Sarah Pike will never go home, Sarah Pike forever will roam.
For four hundred years she walks just the same
The road wide and busy with a new name
But many have driven home in great fright
When they saw Sarah Pike cross the road in the night.
A strange ghostly figure she sobs and she cries
Lost in her sorrow she moans and she sighs
And no-one can save her from her ghastly pain
For the old ones are gone and so is the lane.
Sarah Pike will never go home, Sarah Pike forever will roam.
Just a little tyke
When on the hearth~strike
Then blaze
Warmth flowed throughout like
Happiness 'pon trike
Young days
When you were godlike
I'd feel dreamlike
A phase
Let me paraphrase
It's not hollandaise
Just dreams
Down by waterways
Where God I could praise
Fish teem
As 'pon stream I gaze
Large bream dreams always
Sea bream
No_ hatchlings that gleam
And bring forth moonbeams
That strike
'Pon the eyes_pipe dreams
Whipped and fluffed upstream
A seiche
Dreams come true it seems
Strike brought fire agleam
In Pike
Written: 03/17/2023
Contest: Write Me A Virelai
Sponsor: Kim Rodrigues
Pike..A county in Georgia in which we once lived.
Strike: Daddy would strike the match on the hearth to start a fire. Some fish when they bite do what is called a strike.
Seiche: a disturbance of the water caused usually by atmospheric pressure change.
Apparently, there are sea bream as well as freshwater bream. I am sure the sea bream are much bigger but those tiny bait fish I was catching looked like sea bream to me at my young age.
Checked with how many syllables
In golden dawn of day
Fish the color of lake and sky
Swam Lake Erie wide in eye.
Twenty thousand years past
Fins chased by glaciers:
Blue pike survived
Until too many waves of our breed
Swept them from the lake
With taint and nets of greed
In a hundred years-long dusk.
Too much like Sandburg’s Buffalo Dusk
The Blue pike and their fishermen are gone:
Too much chased from ice to nets
To gray smoke dusk,
Black empty night –
The Blue pike and the men who saw them
Gone.
Congratulations to Simone Biles
An African-American gymnast
Who dares to surpass
The Gold Standard
Autumn leaves are falling
as I look back on life.
Never thought I'd live this long
through the trouble, toil and strife.
The road has been a rocky one
mostly scary, dark and grey
and God sure had to carry me
many times along the way.
As I watch the wind blown leaves
tossed wildly on the ground;
I'm reminded of the way life was
before your love I found.
You have no way of knowing
how your love has changed this man.
So I will strive in every way
to be the best I can.
Cronking ravens’ aerobatics
between rock-pulpits leaning over,
grey disdainful gate-posts.
Our shouts echoed
as we clambered like ants on a wall,
the lake a far glittering pool
in the dark sunken floor of the world.
On the saddle
buttresses of old hostile crags
hung vertiginously over an empty valley
where brown snaking streams reflected the sky.
When the fire died the night wrapped us in cold arms
and stars like dust convened,
aloof to the elegant comet and its silver veil.
Next day, glad to be warm again, on a pass,
the summit of the piled massif
was a distant view in the sun’s torrent,
another world visited, lonely,
while people toiled earnestly up and down the tracks.
When we’ve gone like empires before,
these mountains would still be hunched under the rain and sun.
But we ventured, searched from view to changing view, conquered, grew,
and came back a little wiser
to explore the wider wilderness
6.97
I had a house for sale
They asked me to hold it
Right before I sold it
But my house was a whale
That already set sail
And didn’t give a whit
But it thought what the heck
Coz it altered its tack
So I sold it to Pack
But forgot about Peck
Who was up on the deck
Which was on my whale’s back
But those guys I dislike
So I sold it to Pike
For the HexSonnetta contest
~On Pike’s Peak in moonlight as fog lifted,
the maiden of gloom appeared on her broom,
this witch I saw her as her dress drifted,
with multi colored socks and face filled pocks.
~The maiden of gloom appeared on her broom,
she did screech, “Aren’t I a great beauty’s peach?”
With multi colored socks, and face filled pocks,
I impeached gruesome, eerie, ugly, wench .
~She did screech, “Aren’t I a great beauty’s peach?”
I said, “Return to east, you gruesome beast!"
I impeached gruesome, eerie, ugly, wench,
as she wickedly danced the moonlit glen.
~I said, “Return to east, you gruesome beast!”
She hissed and she retorted , “I’m a beauty!”
As she wickedly dance the moonlit glen,
she hissed, she squawked, in the moonlight she mocked.
~She hissed and she retorted, "I'm a beauty!"
This witch I saw her, as her dress drifted,
she hissed, she squawked, in the moonlight she mocked,
on Pike's Peak, in moonlight, as fog lifted.
For and in Honor of Paula Swanson
And Contest: Back to Back
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