In celebration of National Lemonade Day, which was yesterday, here’s a delightful post from Alice Massa on the subject. Although my mother baked cookies on a regular basis, sadly, our family’s lemonade recipe only involved opening a can of Wyler’s or Country Time. If you have a better lemonade recipe or other summertime memories, please feel free to share them either here or on Alice’s blog. Enjoy these last waning days of summer.
Thanks to fellow blogger Alice Massa for inspiring me to post this again. It was published in Magnets and Ladders several years ago, and I posted it here at that time. In this recent post, Alice encourages her readers to write an abecedarian about summer. I wrote this one several years ago. It’s not exactly about summer, but it will do.
When my father died several years ago, my brother and I performed the song that inspired this poem at his celebration of life with me on piano and vocals and my brother on drums. Without my brother and his drums, I can’t re-produce that version, but here’s Nat King Cole’s rendition, which is a lot better.
Below the video, you’ll find the WordPress player application, and when you press the Play button there, you’ll hear me read the poem. The printed version is below that. This form of poetry is called an abecedarian because the first letter of each line starts with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. Needless to say, this poem is 26 lines. You’ll note that the beginning letter of each line is in bold. In my recorded reading, I emphasize the first word of each line. Enjoy!
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On Straightening Up and Flying Right
A buzzard and a monkey wouldn’t fly together because a monkey wouldn’t be stupid enough to climb on a buzzard’s back, a buzzard being a dirty bird with no morals. Everybody knows that monkeys don’t fly–buzzards do. I would guess that monkeys associate with monkeys. Heaven knows why the song was written. What an imagination someone must have to justify writing it—but with knowledge of values, one would believe that there’s a logical message here. The monkey makes a point when telling the buzzard not to blow his top and to do right. Of course, not blowing your top and doing right are important. People who are angry blow their tops, but the question is do these people not do right? I’ve blown my top a few times. Still, I try to do the right thing. I think that even the best of us, under certain circumstances, blow our tops. It’s not very unusual, but back to the monkey and the buzzard. Why would a monkey allow a buzzard to take him for a ride? It doesn’t require x-ray vision to determine that a buzzard is smaller than the average monkey. You should realize that a monkey would be safer riding a zebra. He wouldn’t have far to fall.
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If you’d like to try writing an abecedarian poem, check out Alice’s guidelines linked to above. The basic idea is to write a 26-line poem with the first letter of each line starting with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. This can be tricky. Good luck. I’d love to read what you come up with, either on your own blog with a link here or in the comments field below.
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