A Truly Jumbo Shrimp
It’s said a jumbo shrimp’s an oxymoron.
A shrimp’s a little thing you put red sauce on
And gobble by the dozen boiled or fried.
Some of us could eat more if we tried.
Enter the tiger prawn, a new crustacean
Not native to these parts. They say it’s Asian.
The prawn has a voracious appetite
And is inclined to get into a fight
For food with native breeds, the white and brown.
This fact is causing fishermen to frown.
The foot-long Asian packs plenty of muscle.
He’d be the winner in a shrimp-league tussle.
The tiger loves what French calls “fruits de mer.”
We’d say a “seafood platter” over here:
Oysters, crabs, and shrimp. It makes you shudder.
The tiger eats his cousins for his dinner!
From any angle, that sticks in my craw.
For cannibals there ought to be a law.
The tiger’s tasty, though, and a sweet deal
If you consider that one is a meal.
If tiger drives the natives out of town,
He may acquire a dubious renown.
Wouldn’t it be wry, a real reversal,
If we called people shrimps who were colossal?
Reference
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Giant-shrimp-raises-big-concern-as-it-invades-the-
2424242.php
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
I enjoyed that, and I rarely read poetry.
Thank you! I’m careful to label my versifying “doggerel” and not poetry. These things I call “didactic” bubbled up in a certain context, and I’m putting them out there because they still amuse me. I want to find out more about what you do. I was struck by a graphic in the recent post of yours I read that looked like some seriously striking painting.
I’m going to go with your “doggerel” being poetry. There was some pretty good music in that shrimp poem.
Just found this. Extremely high praise. Thank you! I have felt for years that one writes (or paints, whatever) for two or three persons who matter. It’s a rare privilege to have that audience. I aspired to be a poet into my late twenties. It was a sour reckoning to move on from that to the messy business of earning a living. The transition will crop up in my journal, I’m sure. Best regards to you.
Yeah, I imagine trying to have a career as a poet is next to impossible and harder than being an artist. It’s a medium, like photography, that anyone and everyone can do and butcher, and few can tell the difference in the results. Also, unlike an image, it takes obvious time to digest a poem. It takes probably as long for a good painting, but people can get some sense in an instant. Poetry you have to slowly savor.
Excellent points all. I keep forgetting who said it, but one of my favorite quotes (by a poet) is “It’s much easier to write poetry than to read it.” I’m fairly content now to be a consumer of poetry with my little memorizing projects and all. But it’s hard to stay away from the scribbling!