(homage to Ogden Nash)
See the buzzard soar, the swallow skim a lake, the kestrel hover;
observe the skylark pouring his little heart out in the sky;
admire the flapwing, lapwing flight of a flock of plover;
what birds do is fly.
At least they oughter,
because once birds get onto the water
they can't help looking absurd
– except the swan, for which nobody I know has an unkind word,
or, mostly, seagulls,
who fly with almost the grace of eagulls,
and in their silvery-white uniforms are impeccably neat,
even if my admiration for their manners is incomplete –
but, shucks,
look at ducks.
And for something really silly,
shaggy-winged, fluffy-headed, and disproportionately
neck-and-bill-y,
consider the pelican, for heaven's sake.
Surely Nature made a mistake,
or left the designing of it to a particularly inept committee,
it's so unpretty.
But once in the air he can soar like a buzzard, though maybe lower,
and skim over the waves with more perfect control
than a swallow, and slower,
and dive for a fish like a living javelin, that clumsy pelican.
By helican!
No, for a shapeless, hapless caricature, created to be comical,
the epitome of what a bird shouldn't be, the penguin
must be the most epitomical.
As he does his impression of a Charlie Chaplin waiter,
you know he'll fall off the ice sooner or later.
But before a warning can escape your lips
he trips
(and slips).
Then, as he slides beneath the waves, ah! See the happy penguin fly,
A graceful bird in his greenblue underwater sky.
Ogden Nash is, in my opinion, greatly under-rated as a poet. True, he seems to ignore rhythm, but as you read his lines, you can't help hearing traditional rhythmical lines echoing behind them. And I hope I've put some genuine poetical feeling in, as he did. It isn't meant to be just amusing.
My favourite lines, the last two, are lifted wholesale from a poem about penguins that a class of eight-year-olds I enjoyed teaching wrote as a class effort.
