Eating Brussels Sprouts may extend your life,
but it will be a long life of eating Brussels sprouts.
Be careful what you wish for!

He was the bard of Avon,
I hail from Flushing, Queens.
I labor in obscurity,
His fans were Royals it seems.
In portraits he’s shown with little hair
mine stood the test of time.
His spelling was atrocious
But spell check fixes mine.

His talent was not of one age
but meant for all of time.
My poetry is dated
And best performed by Mimes.
Its years since I last wrote a play,
Of Will that’s also true.
But players are performing his.
Mine, they never do.
So if my output pales to his
And sadly lacks his wit
What do we have in common?
Not a single manuscript!

Just a simple scrap of paper, stained with his blood, dried red,
It was picked up by a passer- by. It’s author newly dead.
The victims in the towers had been pulverized by stone.
And now could be identified by DNA alone.
For about a decade after, his note was saved, unread,
The M.E. was too busy, bones took precedence instead.

Reflecting pools, the well of souls, are where the towers stood.
There’s a garden of remembrance and that’s all well and good.
His widow and his daughters hung his picture on the wall.
It was like a wound reopened when they finally got the call.

She thought he had died quickly; the second plane had struck his floor.
He worked in the South Tower way up high on eighty four.
“We identified this by the blood, it matched his DNA.”
She stared numbly at the note he wrote that sad September day.

You may view the blood stained note and the message that he wrote
In the Nine Eleven museum in Manhattan
When he'd spent the time we're given,
paper saved him from oblivion.
Now his tragic end will never be forgotten.

Operation Meetinghouse was launched and underway,
Each Super-fortress stripped of all but tail guns for the day.
We came in fast; we came in low, let darkness shield our flight.
Within our bays the bomblets lay to set the Nips alight.

I heard them at a distance, a large incoming flight,
Inexorable and frightening; like Death approaching Life.
I awakened my old mother, took my small child by the hand.
I fled down towards the river, as the first bombs shook the land.

The night was clear and windy and our bombers cut a swathe
of death, fire and destruction through their capital that night.
Their homes of wood and paper were quickly set alight.
We could smell the people burning. We flew so low that night.

Shitamachi was on fire and the high winds helped them spread.
The fire crews were overwhelmed and quickly joined the dead.
The thick smoke made it hard to breathe, old mother couldn’t stand.
The horrors that we saw that night were like tales of the dammed.




Our fuselage of silver reflects their dying light.
Our losses are acceptable; few planes are lost this night.
Flying in formation, we bank right and turn to go
The skyline of the city flickers with a hellish glow.

I walk the ruined streets of home in dawn’s uncertain light.
I hold my small child by the hand, old mother died last night.
We have no home, nowhere to go, I stare in helpless shock
At charred cars and blackened corpses on what used to be our block.

The General is ecstatic and enjoying his cigar;
our losses few, their suffering great, the fortunes of the war.
Tokyo lies in ruins from the fires set that night
How fortunate God is on our side and we are always right.

Solstice stirs my Druid roots.
Those roots entangle with my dreams.
A language, strange and musical,
celebrates the world unseen.

The druids issue from the grove,
solemn in their robes of white.
The doors of time are open wide
on this, the long year’s shortest night.

Ovates divine and bards will speak,
Singing in the Cambric tongue,
The Druid raises arms on high
to praise the power of the Sun.

She lies upon the altar stone.
The victim of the gods’ caprice
Sunlight pours between the stones
where blood was shed and breath has ceased.

Stephen Hawking is of the opinion
this all came together by chance.
No need for an unmoved first mover
while electrons and protons can dance.

We’re adrift in a sea of dark matter,
loosely bound by invisible force.
Spheres orbit without any music-
background static is all per his thought.

Stephen is bound to a wheelchair,
but blessed with an insightful mind.
Surely God will forgive him for doubting
the intelligence of his design.

The moans and screams of dying men;
a scene and sound surreal.
The flower of French Chivalry
cut down by English steel.
English Harry has won this day
on this wet and muddy ground.
So many high born men laid low,
but I am still around.
It was my blood that ransomed me
when others’ blood was shed.
I am the Duke of Orleans.
A poet, some have said.
In the aftermath of battle;
wounded, left to bleed.
Sir Richard Waller found me
and attended to my needs.
So today I am his prisoner,
we’ll become friends in time.
Now I am bound for England
as a “guest” of the English crown.
We’d had the numbers and the strength
to bring proud Henry down.
His Yeoman archers  turned the tide
on this awful muddy ground.
Beset by woods on either flank
No room to strike or move.
It was our Constables’ worst mistake
and the last, as time would prove
Like a dark and deadly rain they fell
out of a clear blue sky.
Here on the field of Agincourt
where Princes came to die.