Foxy: <Dear Squeers,

Your suggestion is not quite appropriate.
You see, David agreed quite some time ago to be
my adopted Grandfather.>

Just a bit of saucy humour, dear lady, you know how I feel about monogamy :-)
It's been a very enjoyable thread with some great poetry.

Dear Poirot,

Thanks.

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
(Shakespeare).

Dear Houellebecq,

All you have to do is sit back and
imagine...

A valuable point to make is that poetry's
various features are there for a reason and
it's often important to highlight them.
For example the arresting visual image of
Tennyson's "The Eagle," or the swinging
rhythm and rhymes of Belloc's, "Tarantella,"
or the sheer enchantment of the sound of the words
in Turner's "Romance." :

"When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,
Took me by the hand.

My father died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetyl
In the sunlight gleams."

There has to be at least one dissenting voice on every thread, and I'm prepared to let that be mine.

As far as I'm concerned, poetry is the performing seal of literature.

Clever, perhaps, and certainly difficult to do well. But ultimately a pointless act.

That goes equally for sonnets, alexandrines, limericks, haiku, dactylic quadrameters, terza rima, doggerel and all the rest.

And while I'm on a roll to make the tip-top of the "not welcome here" list, Foxy, I thought I'd mention something that bugged me in your opening post of the thread.

>>Dorothy Auchterlonie (or Green), in this poem takes Puccini's opera - "Madame Butterfly," and places the characters at Nagasaki, the second site for the atomic bomb drop by the US, on August 9, 1945, against Japan. The first being - Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945.<<

The characters of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly weren't "placed" by Dorothy Auchterlone (or Green) in Nagasaki.

They were always there.

The port of Nagasaki itself is central to the action - it is where Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton's ship, the "Abraham Lincoln" leaves from, and comes back to. It is the port over which Butterfly gazes longingly for the three years that Pinkerton is away - "un bel di vedremo", and all that. Sharpless is the American Consul at... Nagasaki. It's there in the libretto: "Sharpless, Console degli Stati Uniti a Nagasaki - baritono"

The libretto states categorically, "A Nagasaki, epoca presente"

The very first stage instructions on the original score read "Collina presso Nagasaki. Casa giapponese, terrazza e giardino. In fondo, al basso, la rada, il porto, la città di Nagasaki."

"Placed" at Nagasaki by a poet, indeed.

Humph.

Pericles
At least you did it with a sense of humour in there with the 'humph'!
Poetry is not for everyone, it is not a dissenting voice merely a differing one.

I write this for you:

The Performing Seal of Literature

Pericles does not like poetry
Poetry is high falutin', not for all
It is not algebra or geometry
It does not tell a tale, even tall

But paints a picture, some imagery
A scene, a moment, an emotion
No plot, no aim, or chronology
No order, random blind devotion

A poem is not a Hardy or an Austen
But a wisp of an idea
Seeking to invoke the senses
But hopefully not diarrohea

Oh it's invoked a hell of a lot of diarrhoea on this thread!

High falutin', Pelican?

>>Pericles does not like poetry
Poetry is high falutin', not for all<<

You class performing seals as high falutin'?

That does explain rather a lot.

Although it doesn't explain your poem.