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Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Thunder, Jewelry and a Poem that Rhymes

I'm still looking for material to include in the blog from all of you out there.  Just Email it to me and I'll copy and paste it into the blog.  Don't expect me to be your editor, though . I know you can do it!  But for now, be content with three short items from me.  (Note that I've changed the name of the blog to include you guys.)

A reader of the blog commented to me that my poems don't rhyme.  Well, they don't have to, but this time around I wrote one that does rhyme, just to show that I can. And here it is.


Free Verse

Some say free verse which does not rhyme
Does not require quite so much time
To write as poems whose lines I’ve found
Must each end up with the same sound.

Adm’ral Dewey took Manila,
His ice cream choice was vanilla.
The jockey mounted on the horse,
The dot-dash code we know is Morse.

Poems still can have effects sublime
Even though they fail to rhyme
So long as each word that you hear,
Is pleasing to the list’ner’s ear.

But there are games the poet plays,
He counts syllables in each phrase,
Giving his words a solid beat,
Without a rhyme it still sounds neat.
    
*****     *****     *****


Kenneth Jay Lane’s Fabulous Fakes

For those of you, particularly the ladies here in South Florida, there’s an exhibition at the Norton Art Museum in West Palm Beach that should not be missed.  It’s about the work of Kenneth Jay Lane, a stalwart of the fashion world who is widely credited with making costume jewelry as glamorous as real pieces costing millions.  The Norton exhibit features hundreds of his creations for the likes of the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Onassis and Barbara Bush. The exhibit runs until May 1 and, even if you have never ever set foot in a museum, don’t miss it, particularly if you like to hang around in jewelry stores. 

And while you’re there, there’s always a lot of great art to see at the Norton.  Besides their acclaimed permanent collection (don’t miss Psyche and Cupid, attributed to Reubens), they are currently showing a large collection of Egyptian treasures on loan from the Brooklyn Museum and an exhibit of very modern art which attempts to blow your mind in the same manner that the minds of the artists had to have been blown to produce this kind of stuff in the first place!  But you don’t have to meet someone at two in the morning to get a bag of something to inspire you, as these artists obviously had to do. You merely have to visit the show, which is called “Altered States” (and they don't mean Maine or Texas).  Need I say more?

     *****     *****     *****

Sound of Thunder

Most of you have probably heard of, if not read, Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction short story, Sound of Thunder, probably the most widely circulated piece of that genre ever written.  In it, men travel back in time on a hunting expedition and are offered the opportunity to kill dinosaurs, but only carefully selected ones which the “tour guides” know are about to die of natural causes anyway.  The hunters are cautioned not to step off the walkway along which they have been guided because if they did so, they would be stepping back into a pre-historic time where they unknowingly might do damage which could affect the future.  One hunter panics, veers off of the walkway crushing a butterfly with his boot, an act which so alters evolution that when the group returns to the present time, everything is slightly different, words are spelled a little differently, the world seems harsher and most importantly, the potential despot who was about to lose a Presidential election wins it.  If this whets your appetite, read the story.

I relate this because every time I visit our nearby nature preserves and refuges (Green Cay, Wakodahatchee, Loxahatchee or Gumbo Limbo) which permit you to walk through their flora and fauna on elevated wooden walkways, I am reminded of the walkways in Bradbury’s story.  For example, as you walk along the Green Cay walkways (particularly toward sunset), your surroundings cannot be very different than those surrounding the hunters in Sound of Thunder on that day when one of them stepped off of the walkway and killed a butterfly.


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