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Poems on the Internet
The King sent for his wise men all
To find a rhyme for W.
When they had thought a good long time,
But could not think of a single rhyme,
"I'm sorry," said he, "to trouble you."
James Reeves (1909-1978)
When I lived in London and travelled by tube I enjoyed Poems on the Underground — poems printed as adverts on the tube trains, sponsored by the Poetry Society.
Some I liked enough to scribble down as I travelled.
Others I picked up from children's poetry books which I used to read to my first son when he was little, and from other sources.
- Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
- The Traveller Raymond Wilson
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T. S. Eliot (for my father)
- Love
- Epitaph
- Dolor
- Hope
- life
- sitting
- philosophy
- gardening and gardens
- earth
- flowers
- fairies
- dead birds
- not dead cat
(for our cat Chimney who died in the summer of 1995 at the age of about 13)
- property developers
- Fears of Flying
(Not really a poem: this was written by someone I knew a few years back,
and I liked it so much I blagged a copy of it off him.)
- a piece I heard Maddie Prior do, decades ago, in a Steeleye Span gig on the radio.
- This one was in the news a few years ago when there was as a storm about it being set for study by sixth-formers somewhere. Typically the storm was about the f-word rather than the poet's bleak — not to
say misanthropic — view of humanity in general and parenthood in particular.
- These are for ... well, I used to have a list of links to censorship issues current at the time I first wrote this page: the US Communications Decency Act, German and French authorities censoring stuff they didn't like, the McLibel issue, Singaporean and Chinese attempts firewall their citizens off from the rest of the world, NetNanny/CyberSitter type internet censorship devices ... Some of those issues are now history, some – such as Chinese internet censorship – still very much current, and there are new issues: Australian internet censorship, the use of British Libel Law to suppress free speech ... and so on.
On the Ning Nang Nong
On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!
Spike Milligan
The Common Cormorant
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
The reason you will see no doubt,
Is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have failed to notice is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.
Christopher Isherwood
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