A Clerihew for Pope Benedict XVI

Another Clerihew...this one for our latest Pope:

Kind, holy Joseph Ratzinger,
Who is quite fond of hats and fur,
Came to Rome first as peritus,
And is now Pope Emeritus.




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Hugo Chavez, R.I.P.

A little "Clerihew" I wrote for Hugo...

Hugo Chavez, dictator,
Was really a traitor.
And now that he's dead
Nothing more need be said.




Adios...





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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.