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Three Poems by The Schoolmaster
Schoolmasters
He who, of his own free will,
And in his garret's gloom,
With headache pounding doom,
And nose blocked up with chill,
And stiffness in his neck,
Five panes through which wind blows,
And doors that will not close,
And gout in legs and toes,
Than he, who all the week,
Amid the schoolroom's hell,
The grime and noxious smell,
Brats' questions full of air,
Nails bitten till quicks are bare,
Scratching to give lice a scare,
The filthy collars everywhere,
And the teasing to despair
From The Schoolmaster's Letters (De brieven van
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The Lion
A lion's the sort of fellow
Who's never, ever yellow.
His eyes are bigger than those
Of a giant, as is his nose,
With a speed as quick as a flash;
Can unseat a trooper on horse:
He'll very soon have the whole troop running scared.
To conclude, he has been, ever since days of yore,
The world's fiercest carnivore.
Just recently in London town,
A lion gulped a lady down;
No, I'm wrong, I confess -
It wasn't the lion, but the lioness.
The lion is born as a quadruped:
Two legs at the rear and two at the head;
Or, so others claim, two right-hand legs that fit,
And the other two legs set opposite.
The lion's companion in life
Is the lioness, his wife,
And for the young ones, while they are still fed at their mother's breast,
The name ‘cubs’ is commonest.
Golden lions and wooden lions too,
Dutch ones included, are a long-lived crew;
They can still be seen on pub signs and coats-of-arms, though in woods
Should ever a real lion approach you one fine day,
You'd be well advised to retreat without further delay;
Though if stuffed or dead he'll do you no harm;
In that case it'll just be a false alarm.
From Poems by The Schoolmaster (De gedichten van den Schoolmeester, 1975)
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The Wolf and the Lamb
A Fable
(After La Fontaine.)
‘Tell me, curly head,’ said a wolf to a lamb by a brook:
‘Why are you standing there drinking, as if no one would ever look?
It's high time we got acquainted and had a good chat in this nook.
That will be very different from romping with rams in the grass.
Were you going to dirty the water? I can't let that pass.’
‘But, dear sir,’ said the lamb. ‘What am I to do?
How could I dirty your water? I'm not nearly as high up as you.’
The wolf was outraged by this comment, or its ambiguous sense,
Since wolves are always rather quick to take offence,
And said, ‘If that word is your last,
As it's so frequently been in the past,
A young thing like you are will never bamboozle me so.
Why, you hoodwinked me like that only six short months ago.’
‘I assure you, sir,’ said the lamb, ‘it's no fib,
That I was an unweaned infant then and lay helpless in my crib.’
‘Well, my lambkin,’ cried the wolf, as he closed in on the lamb,
‘Then it must have been your son's wife or else your father ram.’
‘I've no father nor daughter-in-law neither, not me,’
Said the lamb, and trembled like a leaf on a tree,
For the moment forgetting its whole pedigree.
‘If you're trying to fool me,’ the wolf said, ‘you'll soon realise
That you must not ever pull the wool over decent folk's eyes.’
Then he wolfed down whole, in his glutton's way,
Like an English oyster, his curly prey.
And took what was left home as a gift to appease his little cubs' cries.
The lamb, of course, thought this not a great treat,
But as for the wolf, it was right up his street.
You sheep, and you children! The moral's that, even by quiet brooks,
A prowling wolf's not nearly as friendly as he looks,
Unless your parents have first given you, at least,
A strapping young nanny, who's a match for the beast.
From Poems by The Schoolmaster (De gedichten van den Schoolmeester, 1975).
All poems translated by Paul Vincent. |
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