Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

A Love Story – Pollination

Sunday, September 5th, 2021

It’s the most important relationship on Earth – everything in Nature depends on pollinators and flowers getting together.

Pollination is ‘a love story that feeds the Earth.’ – Louie Schwartzberg.

For a flower to make seeds and fruit, its pollen (male) must move to an egg (female), usually in another flower – and bees do most of the pollen-moving. The result is a cornucopia of foods from cherries to cashews to coffee. Humans’ relationship with pollinators is also crucial, so let’s provide bees with a variety of flowers, clean water, and poison-free gardens.

Louie Schwatzberg’s Wings Of Life:

Lore and Language of Children

Saturday, August 4th, 2018

Iona and Peter Opie were like the Brothers’ Grimm of the 1950s. Their fabulous book was The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, an epic collection of children’s rhymes, riddles, superstitions, jeers, and customs, garnered from interviews with thousands of English children in the 1950s. Many of these rhymes and tricks persist in the playground today. Here are some gems from the Opie’s collection:

Pinch-me, Punch-me, and Steponmytoes,
Went down to the river to swim,
Two of the three were drowned,
Who do you think was saved?

Old Mr Kelly,
Had a pimple on his belly;
His wife cut it off,
It tasted like jelly.

When the war is over Hitler will be dead,
He hopes to go to heaven with a crown upon his head.
But the Lord said, No! You’ll have to go below,
There’s only room for Churchill, so cheery, cheery oh.

God made the bees
The bees make the honey;
We do the work,
The teacher gets the money.

Scab and matter custard,
Green snot pies,
Dead dog’s giblets
Dead cat’s eyes.
Hard boiled snails, Spread it thick
Wash it down with a cup of cold sick!

 

 

What rhymes with Gershwin?

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

George and Ira Gershwin’s songs

Are one of life’s great pleasures,

Catchy lines and offbeat rhymes

And many tuneful treasures.

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Has this Jonah rhyme in tow:

He made his home-in

That fishes’ ab-domen.

And it was Ira who wisely said it

in Nice Work If You Can Get It:

The man who only lives for making money

Lives a life that isn’t necessarily sunny

Brian Wilson has recently Beach-Boyed the Gershwins

But it’s mellow so I won’t be casting aspersions.

Poet Bees

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

This beautiful poem by Carol Ann Duffy (extract from The Bees) reminded me of a beautiful photo by Sarah Anderson:

Here are my bees,

brazen, blurs on paper,

besotted; buzzwords, dancing

their flawless, airy maps.

Bees flying