Ogden Nash on babies...

"A little talcum
Is always walcum."?

I have so many poems I love it's hard to choose a favourite.
But "The Frivolous Cake" is up there: http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~rafe/the_frivolous_cake.html

Why? Because I read the I had to read the Gormanghast Trilogy to find it.

Dear Foxy,

This is a great thread. I have had a colonoscopy and am a firm anticolonialist as a result. However, we never really know what the other person is going through. Even though we have the same procedure we don't approach it with the same history or the same feeling. We can't know what goes on in the other person's head as the following expresses:

Richard Cory by E. A. Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich — yes, richer than a king —
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Poirot:

Your poem is beautiful.

Dear Foxy,
I to wish you a speedy recovery.
This is a poem I wrote an essay on once. I was born in London and lived there, and in Nottingham until I was ten; enough for a lingering accent and the torture of nostalgia to haunt me; I still haven't been back. And my generation was perhaps one of the last when childhood meant something unscripted. I was riding the buses of Chelsea with my brother, unsupervised, from about the age of five. Anyway, this poem puts you there; I can even smell the smells. Larkins was a tortured cynic-laureate, but this is a slice of life.

I'm blushing again! It's called "The Whitsun Weddings" and here's the link: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7108

Has anyone mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins. His "Binsey Poplars" is apposite, since we are on the brink of strangling the life out of mother Earth: http://www.bartleby.com/122/19.html