Observations of Greece #2
It’s poetry corner this time around, kiddies. Enclosed is a poem I just wrote, inspired by trying to learn to speak a little Greek in our time here. The second poem I wrote when Angela and I were in Africa last year, but with the weather warming up again and the sun beating down, it seems appropriate to Greece, too. The first is called, “Ode to Speaking a Foreign Language,” the second, “Ode to Sunscreen.” They are part of a book I want to write someday, to be entitled, I’ve Been Down this Ode Before.
The next in this series will be a little less poetic, I promise.
Now I approach life phonetically
Rather than faux poetically
Since abandoning my beloved native tongue.
My lips trip so pathetically
And all smile sympathetically
As I talk like a clock whose spring has sprung.
When I do speak, it’s indelicately
My listeners need help medically
Their ears get seared as I cough up a lung
O to cry out again pedantically
To stop working so hard and so frantically
It complicates matters gigantically
Let’s all shout loud and emphatically
Pick one Language! While we’re all still young.
Sunscreen, O Sunscreen
You darken my bright days
You cloak my ivory body
In an artificial haze
Life without you, Sunscreen
Would be an awful sight
I’d have to shrink in horror
From the first hint of light
Creamy white or pastel
Makes no never mind
Just trowel it on like mortar
And I will be just fine.