Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take The Garbage Out
By Shel Silverstein
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
She’d scour the pots and scrape the pans,
Candy the yams and spice the hams,
And though her daddy would scream and shout,
She simply would not take the garbage out.
And so it piled up to the ceilings:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings,
Brown bananas, rotten peas,
Chunks of sour cottage cheese.
It filled the can, it covered the floor,
It cracked the window and blocked the door
With bacon rinds and chicken bones,
Drippy ends of ice cream cones,
Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel,
Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,
Pizza crusts and withered greens,
Soggy beans and tangerines,
Crusts of black burned buttered toast,
Gristly bits of beefy roasts…
The garbage rolled on down the hall,
It raised the roof it broke the wall…
Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,
Globes of gooey bubble gum.
Cellophane from green baloney,
Rubbery blubbery macaroni,
Peanut butter caked and dry,
Curdled milk and crust of pie,
Moldy melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,
Cold french fried and rancid meat,
Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.
At last the garbage reached so high
That finally it touched the sky.
And all the neighbors moved away,
And none of her friends would come to play.
And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said,
“OK, I’ll take the garbage out!”
But then, of course, it was too late…
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate.
And there, in the garbage she did hate,
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot right now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out!
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All that Jack Prelutsky put me in the mood for Silverstein, who was taken from us much too young.
There are little flowers coming up in my neighbor's yard. And bugs -- I took a walk on the path through the woods and there were gnats. Yahoo says it was 63° in the afternoon and will be tomorrow, too. My thermometer in the backyard, which never gets direct sunlight, said it was 61° at about 3 p.m. And there was not a cloud to be seen. Happy January!
I was having a political-free post last night because of my guilt about Gerald Ford and Airplane, but I forgot to mention my delight about Keith Ellison taking a ceremonial oath of office for the US Congress on Thomas Jefferson's Koran. I also never knew before that the Koran and the rest of Jefferson's books were acquired by the Library of Congress in 1815 when Jefferson sold his 6,400 volumes to replace the congressional library that the British destroyed when they burned Washington in the War of 1812.
This is a baby male woolly mammoth found in Siberia in 1977 when it was about 40,000 years old. It fell into a sinkhole and the soft tissues were preserved because the temperature has remained so cold there.
The jawbone of an American mastodon, about 15,000 years old, found in a Florida river.
On the right, a contemporary Florida cypress; on the left, an 18 million year old Florida cypress.
TV tonight was the movie Camp, about a bunch of kids at a musical theater summer camp like the ones I used to go to, that my brother-in-law recommended so highly that I am now wondering if he wanted me to call him saying "OH MY GOD THAT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER!" just so he could laugh at me, because it's about a bunch of theater geeks who get as ridiculed by people in the film as he ridicules Trekkies, people who paint their faces at football games and RenFaire patrons. It was really great fun, but the kids were more sophisticated than the kids I went to camp with in high school. In my day there was almost no actual sex, much more people talking hypothetically about what they would do when they had sex and we mostly assumed the people who claimed they had were lying anyway. But I would adore the film solely because it starts with the song "How Shall I See You Through My Tears" from the phenomenal Gospel at Colonus which I saw in college at Penn's Annenberg Center and have loved ever since.
We also watched "Requiem For Methuselah" which I need to review tomorrow so will gush on and on about it then. I guess Shark had an actor who wanted out of his contract, because they ended a hostage crisis, well acted and solidly written, with a gratuitous shootout. Ah well, I have discovered that Mary Beth Maziarz put out a new CD at the end of last year and ordered it so that shall be my entertainment soon! Plus I got the very pretty Manga Tarot as a belated birthday present, and it's very pretty Chinese shojo style art...someone is about to tell me this is not true manga, I'm sure, but I love the deck and I'm sticking with that!
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