Oops!

I had a big long post going but accidentally lost it. It's just as well, I guess, and I'm certainly not going to do it again.

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When I Was One-and-Twenty

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As I was going to St. Ives

All in the month of May,

I met an aged, aged man

With hair like moldy hay;

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His hair was weedy, his beard was long,

His boots were up to the thigh;

And I never saw a man who looked

So wistfully at the sky.

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"Rain, rain, go away!"

He cried into the blue;

But the sun shone bright, where never lark

Or even eagle flew.

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So now, whene'er I see my cat

Twirling the kitchen knives,

And look again, and find it's just

A bowl of leeks and chives;

I realize that sight grows dim

After old age arrives,

And I understand that man I met

A-going to St. Ives.

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This is the last of the fall contest poems. It wasn't easy. In this category, you had to take lines from well-known poems and put them together to form what the sponsor called a "Cento." They may throw this one out on technical grounds, because I broke down halfway through and started making up lines.

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I have small hope for the easy poems, ones I wrote quickly, like "Old Abe" and "Mother Teresa." But I'm entering 10, so maybe one or two of the old ones will win something.