Palimpsest

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

“Never miss a good opportunity to shut up.”

—Will Rogers

When I was wise I sought obscurity,

And I’ve achieved it now in witless age.

Undone these days, I banish history.

The words I write must wither on the page.

Telling stories, it's said, is telling lies.

A fallow field is “honour’d in the breech,”

And silence, you’ll concur, best sets off speech.

There’s time enough for nothing if love dies.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026, Sedgefield, Western Cape, South Africa

Ornithology

Human-headed winged bull from Khorsabad. University of Chicago Oriental Institute.

Sacred ibises fleeing overhead,

Tiglath-Pileser—Oh, no!—not dead,

King of the Four Corners of the World,

King of the whilom Universe.

He, it's said, made Assyria great.

Al Jazeera bemoans that curse;

Petrodollars corrupt the state—

The global market's flogged its fate!

What’s left to say? "Things could be worse!"?

We’re all Threskiornithidae* today,

Negotiating swamps of jargon,

Confused by memories of Sargon,**

Caesar, Napoleon, and Errol Flynn—

Ancestral bullies bound to win!

* “The family Threskiornithidae . . . 35 extant species of large wading birds, and one more that became extinct in historical times” (Wikipedia). The name derives from the Greek word thrēskeia, "religion.” The African sacred ibis, Threskiornis aethiopicus, has, however, been extirpated in Egypt, where it was originally deemed sacred.

** Sargon the Great (died ca. 2279 BCE), the world's first recorded emperor.

Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa, Monday, April 13, 2026

Tingerigheid

 “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

—Swift

Our ancestors ate oysters on this shore

For eighty thousand years or more.

The food of the poor's become a flourish

Of the elite today—not meant to nourish.

I’d swallow them, if starving,  I SUPPOSE.

Our world’s grown topsy-turvy, Heaven knows!

To check out what I think, I write these lines:

I’m tingerig*—not bold enough for oyster-gulping times!

*Afrikaans: tender, fragile, frail, from Latin tener, “delicate,” Dutch, tenger.

Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa, Thursday, April 9, 2026