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I wrote earlier today about anti-weapons protests taking place in the United Kingdom, but there are other protests going on in Britain as well.

Every year at about this time, Christian preachers take to their pulpits and start to complain about how their religion isn’t taken seriously. This year, in Wales, the complaints have been taken to the streets. Stephen Green of a group called Christian Voice climbed a step ladder outside the Welsh Assembly and told a group of people there, “We’re seeing the Christian faith attacked on all sides. Now it’s under attack in a seat of government in the UK!”

What was this “attack” against Christianity? Was it a drive-by-shooting? A bombing? A riot? An act of vandalism? Nope. It was poetry. The group was protesting an “attack” in the form of a poem written by Patrick Jones.

Some Brits were protesting against attacks that kill and maim people, using weapons made by arms merchants like Raytheon, but Christian Voice did not take part in those protests. The group chose to protest against attacks of poetry instead.

Hm… and why do you think some people don’t take Christianity seriously any more?

From The American Center for Sarah Palin Inspirational Limericks:

As debates go, it was quite a flat one,
each answer most likely a pat one.
Though a night with no drama
is a win for Obama
the same can’t be said for Mc “That One.”

Can you type out some doggerel verse
To explain the McCain universe?
Post a comment right quick
With your own Limerick
Next to Palin you couldn’t do worse

Fear the lesser son
who, desperate to burn bright,
incinerates all.

- Susan Anthony, San Francisco, Poets Against War

Muthee won her the office of Guv
Praying hands brought down might from Above
But Muthee has itches
Hunting ones he calls witches
Fitting Palin like hand in a glove.

---

Can you sum up the Palin witch craze
In a limerick (not with essays)?
Keep it simple and sweet
In this tale, what’s the meat
To digest in these upcoming days?

To see the graceful
design of his child’s stumbles
marks true father’s pride.

Paranthropus appeared in his remains
a southern man robust in cheek and jaw
who gathered nourishment from nature’s grains
and picking leaves and nuts then ate them raw.

His face did not seem gentle, yet contained
an intricate design to fit a niche
untouched by wilder creatures that remained
a coarsened treasure only in his reach.

But in his teeth, the hardest parts he grew,
we see the signs that adaptation, bland,
had led him to eat softer foods to chew
a niche abandoned for sweets close to hand.

Survival of the savory, cusp to root,
the strong nutcracker man was just a fruit.

Read the rest of the story of the soft hard man from Stony Brook.

April was National Poetry Month, which is why I have waited until today to place this sonnet online. After all, the category under which this is placed is called irregular verse, and a sonnet is anything but irregular. I am substituting irregularity in timing for irregularity in form.

A house to die in is the truest kind,
the owner’s spirit sheltered in its heart,
with every passage and chamber designed
to keep the beat of which he is a part.

Except through death, this house cannot be left,
for its beams arching cover and then hide
in shadowed corners histories not bereft
of scenes grown lighter through the bones inside.

Yet, houses are not kept by spirits there,
but through the work of flesh that moving, aches,
and failing in is efforts must prepare
to seek the stranger home eviction makes,

a shade of what its owner once supposed,
a haunting mem’ry of a home foreclosed.

Prairie Home Companion, the radio home of writerly sighing for a country still full of at-home folks who listen to bluegrass in their spare time, is sponsoring a sonnet contest.

Send them a sonnet by midnight tomorrow night, and the staff of Prairie Home Companion will read your sonnet, and if it’s good enough, arrange for it to be read on the air. If yours is the very best sonnet of all, you will win a Sleep Number bed.

Does it seem odd to write a sonnet for a bed? William Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and probably earned money from them somehow, with which he may have bought bread, or a hat, or candles, or a prostitute. It seems more poetic to buy bread, a prostitute, or even a hat from the the proceeds of a poem than a bed. Yet, Prairie Home Companion is sponsored by the Sleep Number bed company, so that’s what they have to offer.

What do you have to offer? Would you offer your sonnet for the chance at a bed? That’s really what you’ll be offering your sonnet for - not a bed, but for the chance to get a bed. The rules of the Prairie Home Companion sonnet contest state: “All entries become the property of Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media and may be read on the air or published in print or electronic form.”

Giving up a poem, especially one so challenging in form as a sonnet, seems more artistic when it is done merely for the chance to have a bed to sleep on, because it suggests the likelihood that most people who enter the contest will surrender their sonnets and not get any bed to sleep on at all, or even a nice letter from Garrison Keillor, or even one of his interns, with a fake signature.

Would you write a sonnet, and then give up ownership of it to a radio show, never to be read on the air, or by anybody else at all, other than your mother perhaps, for the mere hope that you might get a new bed?

If so, what would you choose for the subject of your sonnet?

The call came from Osama, to wit
We must stop cartooning his prophet
We must halt our free speeches
Or he’ll bomb us on beaches
Will we heed the command of a git?

Now come on! Write your own piece of verse
On the news from our grand universe
It’s important to share
We really won’t care
If your try is for better or worse

Starlight sends us this Bush Haiku tonight:

Anachronism,
Bush is too long from age old
To burn as Voice God

Proposal: Search terms are the short-form poetry of our age.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Beams are exposed in
a Unitarian church
by falling plaster.

I walked along the shore in Long Beach,
California,
watching the sandpipers probe
the edge of the water for edible debris
when I came upon a find of my own.
The remains of a bright yellow gallon jug
of some kind of spray or oil,
for keeping insects out of a kitchen
or lubricating a car,
had been abandoned,
washed out
into the ocean,
then cast back upon the shore,
made fragile by the sun,
its bottom and sides broken away.
The cap was still in place,
with the words: Inner Quality Seal.

Merrill Lynch loses
ten billion but need not fear
life on the streets in winter.