Let's bring thou back

Let's bring back thou and thee and thine,
For personal use, both yours and mine;
They'd add both depth and clarity
To where you stand with they and we.

And what of you, how would you know,
If sole or plural, where you'd  go?
You would be left for public use,
For matters simple or abstruse.

Ideas like this should not provoke
An urge to laugh, much less, to joke;
If we could wake it from its slumber,
We might invoke the dual number!

The old king

In days gone by, a tired old king,
Though weary, worn, and grey of hair,
Still believed that his heart could sing,
And wed a girl, a maiden fair.

One day, a callow youth came by;
He wooed her well, this winsome boy,
With ardent glance and wistful sigh,
And stole the old man's greatest joy.

The king, a bitter lesson learned;
Farewell to youth, and cheating wives!
With honest love so coldly spurned,
The king took from them both, their lives.

- Heinrich Heine
  Translated from the German

If the Auk could talk

The other day, I heard a talk
About a bird they called the Auk.
The fellow (also known as great),
Extinct by eighteen forty-eight,
Knew how to swim, but couldn't fly;
He thought of it, but wouldn't try.

What's the rhyme?

When I looked up some rhymes for botch,
I found a few, from blotch to watch
(The next-to-last, I saw was swatch.)
Then the level dropped a notch;
My downward glance came up with crotch.
If I drank booze, I'd have a Scotch.

There's no guarantee

It was fun while it lasted, enjoying nice things,
The new autos and houses, vacations, gold rings,
Fancy dinners and drinks, Broadway shows, front-row seats,
Dressed in well-tailored clothes, your game-plan seemed so sweet.

Recall the excitement, when your flame burned so bright?
But no thing's guaranteed, and day changes to night.
When they bring you the bill at the end of it all,
Will you sign with a flourish, or just with a scrawl?

Was the food very tasty, well-worth what it cost?
Did it equal the best, was the entree well-sauced?
Was it less than you liked from the very first taste?
Did you make a mistake, did you choose it in haste?

No one owes you success in the choices you make,
No one watches your steps on the path that you take;
The direction you choose for your wanderings through life,
Is your own choice to make; Lady Luck's not your wife.

The joining

The faithful surf gives out a steady roar,
And makes his urgent pleas unceasingly.
The lover's song, voiced low, sometimes will soar
To trumpet loudly of his constancy.
The surf retreats, returns in endless flow,
To press abundant kisses on the beach,
While gliding gulls ignore the scene below,
As surf and shore keep teasing, each with each.
The land and sea are one beneath the tide,
Controlled by orders from the ruling moon;
No human intervention will divide
Their ordained merging, late or soon.
The swarming surf recites an ancient poem,
And joins the land beneath the heavens' dome.

Not set in stone

I used to think that Strunk and White
On grammar, had the rules just right;
In fact, The Elements of Style
Has been like gold, for quite a while.

The book tells you the "what" and "how"
Good language usage should allow,
But living language has a way
Of changing almost every day.

New forms are born, and do their part;
Old forms decline, when new ones start,
And sometimes, we may even see
Old forms regain their currency.

I think that Messieurs Strunk and White
Worked hard to try to do it right.
Like weather, language, rain or shine,
Insists on changing all the time.