English, by Richard Keogh

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother;
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear;
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose;
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Why man alive,
I learned to talk it when I was five;
And yet to write it, the more I try,
I haven't learned it at fifty-five.

~ Richard Keogh

Bayard Taylor, 'A Night With a Wolf'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

A Night With a Wolf

Little one, come to my knee !
Hark how the rain is pouring
Over the roof in the pitch dark night,
And the winds in the woods a-roaring

Hush,my darling, and listen,
Then pay for the story with kisses;
Father was lost in the pitch-black night
In just such a storm as this is.

High on the lonely mountain
Where the wild men watched and waited;
Wolves in the forest, and bears in the bush,
And I on my path belated.

The rain and the night together
Came down, and the wind came after,
Bending the props of the pine tree roof
And snapping many a rafter.

I crept along in the darkness,
Stunned and bruised and blinded...
Crept to a fir with thick-set boughs,
And a sheltering rock behind it.

There, from the blowing and raining,
Crouching I sought to hide me;
Something rustled,two green eyes shone,
And a wolf lay down beside me.

( Little one, be not frightened... )