The occasional, often ill-considered thoughts of a Roman Catholic permanent deacon who is ever grateful to God for his existence. Despite the strangeness we encounter in this life, all the suffering we witness and endure, being is good, so good I am sometimes unable to contain my joy. Deo gratias!


Although I am an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church, the opinions expressed in this blog are my personal opinions. In offering these personal opinions I am not acting as a representative of the Church or any Church organization.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

A Clerihew for Martha Coakley

I've long been a fan of an odd little verse form called the Clerihew. Named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, it consists of a pseudo biographical quatrain of two rhyming couplets. The lines are of uneven length and prose-like in rhythm. Bentley was a schoolboy chum and lifelong friend of G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton even illustrated many of Bentley's published Clerihews. Here's an example of one of Bentley's many Clerihews:

"I quite realized," said Columbus,
"That the earth was not a rhombus,
But I am a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid."

Anyway, I was thinking about Martha Coakley and the remarkably inept campaign she has run for the US Senate seat of Massachusetts previously held by Ted Kennedy. Two months ago she had a 30+ percentage point lead in the polls over her Republican opponent, Scott Brown. And now the latest poll shows her trailing Brown by four points -- a truly extraordinary development for which she has only herself to blame. And so I wrote a Clerihew celebrating this fact...

Ms. Martha Coakley
Is no Annie Oakley.
It seems she can only shoot
Herself in the boot.
...and that's all I have to say.

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