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SCHERZA
RIMA
The
bullfinch, neck-deep in eyebright, passes
that
inch of sparkling tin you saw
with
hardly a ‘goodness’ and no ‘alases’.
He
merely humphs his mayorish maw
and
dots for beetles, the glare forgotten.
Not
so the haggard black miser daw.
There’s
nothing in his rules, fair or rotten,
he’d
not consider worth more than a moan
to
put Nature’s mirror with his bits of cotton.
Myopics
can’t read ‘Leave Well Alone’.
Not
believing Pythagoras just a mug,
I
think Doctor Faust, as he leaves this zone
for
Hell’s stage-change, must certainly shrug
the
jackdaw’s gown on the very first time;
they
wear the same coat who have sipped one jug.
But
to sensible finches the mirror’s a crime:
best
leave it sun-struck, alone in the grasses,
soiled
by fingers and dried snail-slime.
Alan
Marshfield
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