L'addition: A Modest Proposal

"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."—Anon. [Jonathan Swift], A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729)

Three hundred and forty thousand pigs are slaughtered each day in these United States, or about 236 a minute

as are twenty-two million chickens, or about 15,278 a minute.

These statistics are merely approximate, of course,

and omit the numbers for the cattle, sheep, turkeys, and other beings

who also daily die that upright apes may live.

Tell me again, You there, standing in that dock,

Just what is it, exactly, that you have to offer?

I suggest you gaze with caution on the Animal Clock.†

They die humanely, though, you claim?

We have to eat! I’m not to blame!

But life will blame you all the same.

Do we split the tab, go Dutch? There are all too few innocents in this addition.

Wouldn’t want to put you in a false position!

† https://animalclock.org/

Strambotti

For Frank Prince

What feelings might encapsulate a soul

Or render into verse some scrap of sense?

Remembering love was your own cherished goal,

But you and she have both departed hence.

How should the dead return to speak in tongues?

It does no good, if good there be to make.

Music forgotten sets forgotten songs.

The waiting dreamer gives himself a shake.

I’m with you there, in what you felt that day.

I'll seek to speak—if something’s left to say.

***

I now exist, as you once did before.

We neither chose to run the rapids here

Or were consulted at the open door.

An end approaches, be it far or near.

This estrabot to deny might serve

What doom awaiting at the coming swerve?

What nonsense, though, to make a final wish!

Life’s not a meal in which dessert’s a dish.

Cf. F. T. Prince, The Doors of Stone: Poems 1938–1962 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), "Strambotti," I–XVII.

This verse form became popular in the fifteenth century in Italy, where Sir Thomas Wyatt discovered it, who introduced it in England. The word strambotto derives from the Occitan (Provençal) term estrabot.

Terence, Schmerence: Τραμπ στη συνέντευξη με τον Μασκ

Roman theatre scene with flute player and actors in goat-skin costumes. Mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

“Terence, Schmerence? [Γαβρέντιος, Τερέντιος;]—Who’s fit for nothing

but the buffooneries of the Latins,

yet hankers after our Menander’s glory.”—C. P. Cavafy, “Disgruntled Theatregoer”*

Terence Afer, a dark-skinned slave down crushed Carthage way,

in the second century before the "common era" (BC),

a pretty face, it seems, won his freedom and "made it big on [Italic] Broadway" (as they could've used to say)

—his playThe Eunuch earned 8,000 nummi, most ever for a comedy on the Roman stage—

bequeathing us this slavey fiddle-dee-dee:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto / “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me,”†

quoted ad infinitum the world over by humbugged doofuses

—"and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time"‡

—although manifestly alien demons, with passing human mugs,

glare at us from every TV screen and scrolling servile smart-phone page.

It's not as bad as all that, you oh-so-slyly rage,

in weasel words to save your wretched cage:

"I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air . . . but I'll nip him in the bud."††

Tough luck, amigos! I fear the human name is mud.

Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3868 (2r), a ninth-century image of Terence, flanked by two black players, possible copy of a third-century original

* Cavafy translated from the Greek by Peter Mackridge in Omphalos 1, no. 1 (March 1972), 31. The poem's subtitle, an Athens newspaper headline, reads: "Trump in Interview with Musk."

† Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos / The Self-Tormentor, act 4, scene 2.

‡ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.

††Sir Boyle Roche, Bart., in the Anglo-Irish Parliament, early 1800s.