My response to Karla Dorman's challenge on what poems we love best.

What a great dame,
that Barbara Fritchy--
I bet she scratched
when she was itchy!

No, no, no. That's not my favorite poem, but it's one of the many humorous ones I occasionally recite at whim for purely comedic purposes. It came from a thick book I used to tote everywhere as a child, The Big Book Of Jokes And Riddles, featuring something like 9,000 mostly bad kid-oriented jokes, riddles, and other things you'd find funny only if you happened to be half-crocked or age three. Family members would roll their eyes when they saw me heading toward them carrying that thicker-than-the-NYC-phonebook thing. I still have it somewhere...the last I saw of it, it was missing about a third of its pages, the cover was long gone, and the Magic Marker I'd used to color in some of the pictures in it had bled through and made the pages behind nearly unintelligible.

I guess the first poem I ever heard was The Night Before Christmas, and while I tried to make its recitation to me each Christmas Eve a new tradition, my parents couldn't usually remember exactly how it went, so I'd get some kind of weird abridged version instead.

My favorite book of poetry is A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six, and my all-time favorite poem is The Knight Who's Armor Didn't Squeak, which I can recite in its entirety upon command...but I really need to rehearse it at least once beforehand to make sure I'm not leaving any of it out.

Sir Thomas Tom is a self-proclaimed brave knight, but in actuality a coward. He prides himself on his ability to read and write and do his numbers better than the majority of illiterates that abound (which is to say, he's really hardly better than anyone else, but he has a title, and he's gonna milk it even if he has to exaggerate about it a little) and he really does have his own castle (Castle Tom), which he basically protects by pretending no one's there until danger passes, and then he blows a triumphant trumpet-blast to celebrate his victory over avoiding conflict.

This reminds me of so many people I know...not necessarily in any derogatory way, but we all have our moments when we like to think of ourselves as something much more than we really are, and are grateful when we don't actually have to prove it.

One day Tom's takin' a nap in a ditch (so no one will see him or confront him) and another knight rides by who's armor makes no clink or squeak. This is Tom's grandest achievement--invisibility, basically--and to think there might be another who can now claim the rights to this sort of stealth is an outrage to him. In the sole moment of aggression in his life, he rides quietly up behind this unawares challenger to his very minor claim to minute fame, and bops him on the head with the flat of his sword. The other knight, Sir Hugh, topples gently to the ground where Tom strips him of his armor and tosses it in a handy pond, thus ensuring he will always be the one and only knight who's armor doesn't squeak!

I guess it's about avoiding conflict, using your talents and abilities to give yourself the best life you can even if what you have seems to amount to very little, trying to maintain a good reputation, and using your mind to solve problems rather than aggressive behavior. ...maybe I'm really just reading too much into a silly children's poem.

Milne also wrote the haunting lines,
"Where the wind comes from,
where the wind goes,
no one can tell me,
nobody knows..."

It's part of a much larger piece, but that's the one part which sticks with me.

I adore my collected poems of Edgar Poe, and my book of Japanese drinking songs (which come across like frothy, wondrous poems), but in reality, if it wasn't for AuthorsDen, I'd seldom read any poetry at all.

My experience working as a manager for a large bookstore chain taught me that poetry only sells if it's written by Jewel, Tupac, or printed in children's books. The poetry section of the store was ludicrously minute, and slim, stapled collections sold at about the rate of one a month, with a slight surge around Valentine's Day.

I wrote my first poem while in grade 3, and since then I've been asked on occasion to pen love poems for different guys to woo the objects of their teenage lusts. Aside from that...nada. I'd just write for my own entertainment. Now that I've found the 'Den, I sometimes write three or four poems on a slow day at work, but a number of these will still never make it here on this site.

"Poetry is the voice of the heart, subject to tempermental mood swings, sometimes describing an idea in part, other times overly describing things in a flowery language that to some may sound sweet and to others' untrained ears quite gay, but poetry that's well done's a treat--to hear the stories each heart has to say."

That's one I wrote and like, but wasn't gonna stick in the poetry section.

I read through the most recent poems whenever I post, and that practice is what made me initially miss my favorite AD poem. I have seven of my favorite authors' works in my AD library, but the one that makes me smile, the one that I truly treasure the most is Ten Li'l Gators by Karla Dorman herself. I said I've written poems for plenty of others before...but that was the first time anyone had ever written a poem especially for me.

Thanks, Karla. You're a gem! Keep up the great work, and keep on inspiring others to entertain and emote through poetry and all the other facets of writing that the 'Den is designed to encourage.

Hoo-wee, I sure done enjoyed this 'ere gran' challenge!