Well-Versed in Offerings of Light Rhymes

Like almost everything else, light verse, I find, is in greater supply than we realize.

Lately, in printing a few verses by such masters as Richard Armour, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Samuel Hoffenstein, I have mourned the passing of this blithe form.

But there are plenty of versifiers out there, eager to find some ink. Some have published, most have not.

Molly C. Rodman recalls that she published some in Judge magazine; then it folded. Here’s a sample of her work:

How can I know what you’re thinking

Since your heart is wearing a mask?

My heart is yours for the asking,

But dammit-- why don’t you ask?

Sherry Lewis of Costa Mesa says she spent the 1930s trying to write light verse in the Parker style, but none was ever published. All right, one is now:

He sent me a lily,

So white, so pure;

My heart beat a silly,

“He’s mine, for sure!”

Until I discovered--

And that was the end--

He’d chosen red roses

For my best friend.

Josephus Reynolds of Beverly Hills says he is reminded by my remark that “the British are so deucedly civil” of a limerick he wrote on safari in Tanganyika. Inspired by the long, thin, sharp horns of the local rhinos, and the typical British reserve, he wrote:

Two hunters from Britain that I know

Were impaled on the horns of a rhino

And, although en brochette,

Had not formally met.

Did they speak to each other? Oh, my, no!

Walt Hopmans of Santa Barbara chides me for not printing numerous verses he has sent me in the past, and tries again. His shortest:

Avoid

Freud

Joan G. Gabrielson goes for the the purely hysterical in “The Hypochondriac and the Doc, no quack:”

She asked the Doc to diagnose

Her pains--from head to toes.

Unperplexed, he Rx’d:

“You must cut down on leisure,

For you’ve had a Julius Caesar.”

Gene Riley of Torrance says he has collected his own verses as “Cursory Rhymes,” striving for timeless themes, short but profound, and pertinent to everyone’s experience. Here are a few of his:

Relations save us lots of grief

When they make their visits brief.

Adults can’t play on a children’s slide,

It makes them look undignified.

We know that we are growing old,

When we start doing what we’re told.

Ed Kysar of Reseda offers a tribute to the genre:

To Parker, Armour, Nash, et al,

Homage here, abundant,

From those who wish to let it all

Hang out, sans the redundant.

Harry Cimring says he published thousands before certain popular magazines folded and newspaper columnists turned from potpourri columns to the current theme column. Here’s one he wrote, after a weekend in Yosemite, before the word biodegradable was coined (It was published by Matt Weinstock):

Swept away by the winds and the rains

Are the cardboard, paper and other remains;

But this I note as the scene I scan:

The indestructibility of the beer can.

Marc Berkov of Culver City titles this one on modern art “Is a Rose Really a Rose?”:

If anything goes

In poetry or prose,

Even three minutes silence

Of a musical appliance,

Or two red dots apart

Considered to be art--

Don’t you find it rather funny

You can’t use abstract money?

Deborah Parducci of Pacific Palisades wrote this one for friends’ 25th wedding anniversary:

Ain’t it nifty?

Try for fifty.

And also this one:

I wish that it were 1930 So many words would still be dirty

To which I add one of my own:

As our 50th grows near,

We shed a tear;

It’s too much trouble,

To go for double.