I found a whole book of monster poems maybe 19 or 20 years ago in the Children’s Section of the library. I don’t remember who the author was, but I’ve kept a copy of this particular poem all these years, because while we were reading the poem, and I was trying to do it in a chilling voice, it suddenly struck us so funny that we started laughing hysterically and I couldn’t get through the poem.
The Ghoul
The gruesome ghoul, the grisly ghoul
without the slightest noise
waits patienty beside the school to feast on girls and boy.
He lunges fiercely through the air
as they come out to play
then grabs a couple by the hair
and drags them far away.
He cracks their bones and snaps their backs
and squeezes out their lungs,
he chews their thumbs like candy snacks
and pulls apart their tongues.
He slices their stomaches and bites their hearts
and tears their flesh to shreds
he swallows their toes like toasted tarts
and gobbles down their heads.
The candy snacks part was already making it hard for me to read, but it was the toasted tarts line that made us bust out laughing. It just seemed so absurd.
It has a few more stanzas, but I guess times have changed — it just doesn’t seem as funny as it did back then. I wonder if it’s still in the library.
Isn’t the mythological Sphinx a woman? That’s what I thought, anyway. In Jared Carter’s poem by the same name, the Sphinx is an “it” — so it can’t be the pharoah Sphinx either, but whatever it is — here’s an excerpt from the poem
It lives on, and with each new day, asks
the old questions, of strangers passing by,
or even of itself. Often I have heard it
calling across the wastes, like a hot wind
January 9th is the birthday of Hebrew poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, who wrote The City of Slaughter, in tribute to the victims of the Kishinev pogrom.
Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Those burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript.
Fragments again fragmented.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
My mom never told me that, but I do recall something about ‘idle hands’ and ‘the devil’s workshop,’ which is probably a lot worse to tell a little kid who thinks the devil is a big red monster with horns and yellow eyes.
The devil makes an appearance in this song with John Berryman on Washington Bridge right before he jumped off it, and I guess the devil was a woman. Maybe she had red high heels and horns.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
When he was feeling a little more wordy than that, Carl Sandburg also wrote
PEARL FOG
OPEN the door now.
Go roll up the collar of your coat
To walk in the changing scarf of mist.
Tell your sins here to the pearl fog
And know for once a deepening night
Strange as the half-meanings
Alurk in a wise woman’s mousey eyes.
Yes, tell your sins
And know how careless a pearl fog is
Of the laws you have broken.
I like fog in music …
FOGGY FOGGY DEW
When I was a bachelor, I liv’d all alone
I worked at the weaver’s trade
And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
Was to woo a fair young maid.
I wooed her in the wintertime
And in the summer, too
And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong
Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.
Can you believe that singing that in public landed Burl Ives in jail in Mona, Utah because authorities thought the song was “bawdy.” Weird indeed!
That isn’t the same song as THE FOGGY DEW
No one can deny that Sinead O’Connor did that song justice!
