Biomimicry

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”—stock exhange proverb

Who first tamed a pig—no doubt, a litter

Of piglets orphaned in some bosky dell—

Made a metaphor for greed’s devotees as well.

Hogs serve, too, as patterns for the jerks

Who rough-hew lives and call it “public works”

And plutocrats who have them at their beck and call.

“If birds didn’t exist, would planes?”*

If pigs didn’t exist, would politicians?

We see in Nature’s drafts the late perfected skills

That serve to chain the planet to their wills.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course,

though seldom leaders on the bourse.

The weasel's not a model for the billionaire.

The simile’s unfair—mustelids make honest kills.

Envoi

“ . . . there is boundless theft In limited professions.”—Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, act 4, scene 3

*Reddit post.

Fame

Who, nowadays, reads E. Phillips Oppenheim

Who was so famous once upon a time?

Who listens any more to Crosby or Sinatra?

Who laughs at Bob Hope’s jibes, who joked

—but perhaps it was some slavey of a scribe—in 1962,

‘’If they knew what we know, they’d be behind too!”

Soon that might yet be funny once again,

Though we and they are different, not the same.

I'd say the odds are better than even money!

Monday, September 11, 2024

Schadenfreude

Chaïm Soutine , The Table, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (ca. 1923)

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

—Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”

There’s no word for Schadenfreude in English,

That feeling with which obsequious sigh

I thank the Fates it’s you—But who knows why!

Not me, that's skewered on the carving dish.

Maybe it's too frank for us Anglophones,

Much as we sense it in our Saxon bones,

Who likewise are reluctant to agree

That murder's suicide—with the wrong ID.

November 8-10, 2024