Poem for Tuesday and Neototems Children's Garden

The Pig
By Roald Dahl

In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn’t read,
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn’t puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.
What was the reason for his birth?
Why was he placed upon this earth?
His giant brain went round and round.
Alas, no answer could be found,
Till suddenly one wondrous night,
All in a flash, he saw the light.
He jumped up like a ballet dancer
And yelled, “By gum, I’ve got the answer!”
“They want my bacon slice by slice
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops
“To put in all the butchers’ shops!
“They want my pork to make a roast
“And that’s the part’ll cost the most!
“They want my sausages in strings!
“They even want my chitterlings!
“The butcher’s shop! The carving knife!
“That is the reason for my life!”
Such thoughts as these are not designed
To give a pig great peace of mind.
Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A pail of pigswill in his hand,
And Piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes the farmer to the floor . . .
Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let’s not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he’d finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.
Slowly he scratched his brainy head
And with a little smile, he said,
“I had a fairly powerful hunch
“That he might have me for his lunch.
“And so, because I feared the worst,
“I thought I’d better eat him first.”

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On Monday I was back to being boring -- I hung up hooks in my closet from which to hang my scarves, I folded a lot of shirts and sorted a bunch to give away, I paired up what seemed like six hundred socks and pondered how many socks one person really needs (because of course I need all eight Avengers pairs and the three DC pairs and six pairs with cats and enough Halloween socks for two weeks in October). I tried to get bagels but someone had bought all the pumpernickel and sesame before I got there and there was only one rye. At least Giant had spicy pepper cheese.

At least I now have an Alolan Marowak and a Registeel on both accounts. We spent the evening sorting stuff while watching Versailles, which is gloriously mindless escapism featuring the men with the best hair on television, and Elementary, which is less mindless and has less glorious hair but has Lucy Liu being brilliant and if they're doing this storyline with Marcus because they feel like killing him off rather than to give him his own story arc, I will be furious. From Seattle Center's Neototems Children's Garden, Gloria Bornstein's sea creatures and a flying pig:















I was sure I took a picture of the octopus too, but I can't find it now.