Cousin Harvey's New Car

COUSIN HARVEY'S NEW CAR

 

By

L. Ruth Carter

 

The frog sits alone in the dawning gloom

Fearing the advent of a pending doom.

He hates to eat insects or beetles or ants

But his tongue darts out in gluttonous dance.

 

His plight stirs my soul to wonder and grieve

Of what Mr. Frog has stashed up his sleeve.

He shouldn't starve, for of bugs there's no lack

But, oh! How he'd like a nice juicy Big Mac!

 

Forty-nine thousand six hundred and three

Lady bugs, spiders, five gnats and one flea

Live right up his sleeve for he put them there

To party and buzz without any care.

 

Oh, frog, you must soon accept that your fate

Is linked to the fact that you have not ate.

So eat up those wigglers making you squirm

And fulfill the purpose of each little worm.

 

***

Author's Note

Now is the time for all serious scholars of literature to determine author's intent.

Reviews

[Sara Boepple]

Hmmmm. Let me put on my literary critic hat. (Large sweeping gesture, doffs hat). This is obviously a poetic reflection of a topsy-turvy society, trapped in an ecological crisis of epic (49603) proportions, mis-use of natural resources by hoarding instead of utilizing items of nearest availability, all shadowed by the looming malevolence of mankind's oil-rapaciousness as symbolized by the New Car. Elements of subornment and temptation, lust and the sins of the flesh (the Big Mac) are infused, along with an allusion to Original Sin (the Worm, of course, is a medieval reference to Satan the Snake). The observer is drawn to the struggle of the frog, but ultimately is more-closely related to the destroyer (Cousin Harvey) than to the "green" frog, and as such is portuning the frog to change and return to the natural order before mechanization destroys it.

Interrupted anapestic tetrameter and the tight, closed-couplet rhyme scheme indicate that these quatrains are stylistically descended from the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the post-Victorian/early-modern poets such as Pound, Eliot and Auden.

There. How'd I do?

[Ruth Carter]

Sara, you rock! I laughed and laughed. You never, I mean never, cease to amaze me! And to think I had all that stuff in my poem! I never knew!