| || upend, rough, hidden, pagoda, had (the) upper hand.
Image from the Internet.
The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed! And couching them in Poetry is definitely NOT required.
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.
13 comments:
After bragging about finding a better source, today I'm frustrated! My source had a random arrangement of them, and today was one it skipped. I had Googled about 5 papers that had these images, but only bookmarked one of them. Now I'd like to check the others, but I can not find the correct query phrase to locate them again! Anyway, today is from my old source. :(
It looks fine, Owen. My compliments!
You are a perfectionist, sir, like all true artists. And we really appreciate the results.
But you must give yourself a break every now and then.
~ OMK
At the Pagoda Francais the food was tres delicieux
The entrees superb as well as toutes les hors d'oeuvres
But for those who choose to rough it, there's a hidden menu
Ask for coquille st jacques at this splendid venue
Perhaps apres le repast one may want to try his hand
At the secrets of upper cuisine, oh that would be grand.
"Come to chez Wilbur, mangez beef bourguinon"
"And end up with indigestion? That would be no fun".
WC
And then there's imperfection. It started out as a Chinese restaurant until I drifted into French as I (and OMK, too) am wont to do.
I did have some crab at an Ocean buffet in Ocala last night. No snail on the menu.
I trust Misty's lecture on Marianne Moore went well. I just finished a biography of John Wooden by Seth Davis who makes appearances on ESPN mornings occasionally. That is I think I recognize him from his picture on the cover.
Wooden loved poetry and wrote and recited same. One of his UCLA players, Sven* Nater wrote poetry too and pretty well from the one example.
WC
*We just had SVEN at CC. Nater was a backup at UCLA (Bill Walton) but was a pretty good NBA player. YouTube has old NBA games and he was in one.
Ah Wilbur ~ Your gourmet menu takes me back--wa-ay back to the first time I ever spent in New Orleans. I made a decision then to do a taste tour of all the famous French restaurants. And I did!
Antoine's, the Three Sisters, Galatoires, etc. And the very best meal I had was in a tiny but elegant hole-in-the-wall in that town right across the river.
The name escapes me! But the entre was Coquille St. Jacques--the first time I'd tasted it!
Superb!
Thanks for the memory.
Now, my turn...
"The Upper Scan"
The refuge lay partly hidden behind a thick bush
a flattened-dome haven, roughly the shape
of an upended pagoda. Monsieur squeezed his tush
inside the archway. It had been a close scrape.
But now he was safe, at least for a while.
What was this place he was lucky to have found?
He'd been searching for safety for over a mile,
a hideout, a shelter, a place to go to ground.
Wasn't there a sign? He'd scarcely had a glance--
he'd been so rushed!--all day he'd been on guard,
but now he could extend his feelers and scan,
just making out the letters... "le Motel du Cafard."
~ OMK
Owen, I agree with Ol' Man Keith.
Wilbur, your poem is a French delight--not just the menu and its elegant dishes but also the way you worked in the Jumble words (liked the way you 'upended' 'end up').
Ol' Man Keith, I hope your Monsieur will be safe in his haven, and that the cockroaches won't bite him. Wish he had some friends to help him, like my Paul.
"Trial"
Paul's arrest his life did upend,
though his friends did him strongly defend.
They planned to keep all this hidden
and so gossip was mostly forbidden.
They knew he would never steal
so they worked hard to get him a deal.
The next few weeks were rough
but their defense was tough.
Their testimony on the stand
finally gave them the upper hand,
and with cries of joy and glee
they managed to set Paul free.
In they end they needed a coda
so they all gave thanks in a pagoda.
Wilbur, thank you for much for your kind remembering my Marianne Moore lecture at the Senior Center yesterday. It actually went much better than my first lecture, even though I had a much smaller group yesterday--only about ten people. But when we came to the end of the discussion, they all said how much they enjoyed it, which made me feel wonderful. So I'm very relieved and in great spirits today.
Dear Misty,
I enjoyed your detailing of the passion of Paul. You give us a rundown of the various steps, the phases that a defendant suffers to work his way through the justice system. Glad he had good friends and that it all worked out.
But,
I take it Paul was innocent, and he
deserved his hard-fought victory.
I doubt he'd be much help in jail
to my guy--if only a matter of scale.
You see, "Monsieur" has nothing to fear
from roaches; wouldn't that be queer?
He's where he ought to be, a cafard peer!
(Where you check in, but you...)
~ OMK
Glad to see your lecture went well! Are people actually gathering at the center these days--or was it some kind of Zoom arrangement?
I remember seeing & hearing Marianne Moore.. She came and gave a reading when I was an undergrad at SF State, probably about 1959 or '60. The main auditorium was nearly full.
I was just a kid. I remember her hat.
~ OMK
Loved your poetic response to Paul, Ol' Man Keith. Yes, I'm afraid all my lectures are on Zoom these days. Feel free to check in, if you're interested in Edna St. Vincent Millay or T.S. Eliot, coming up, but they're a bit of a mess on Zoom.
How amazing that you got to see Marianne Moore in person! And I bet she wore her black tri-corner hat. She claimed she had to wear it because she had the head of a "hop toad." (I think that's what she said and looked it up--it's a frog that hops rather then leaps. No idea what its head looks like).
Yes, that's the hat she wore. I don't recall her offering an explanation at the time, but it was quite a distinctive feature.
It made her seem to be a figure out of American history--which, in a way, she was.
Glad you liked my reply to your "Trial."
I needed to let you know Paul was/is on a different level from my "Monsieur," as I wasn't sure it was clear that my guy was himself a Periplaneta americana.
I was trying to capture the mental (?) state of a critter scurrying to safety, then finding himself in the false security of a Roach Motel, the kind we needed to use in our kitchens in NYC and in Richmond VA.
The Frenchie slant was to give it a little je ne sais quoi,... a touch of Continental dignity?
How nice to live in roach-free SoCal!
~ OMK
We're now feeling sorry for cockroaches?
Just realized, tomorrow is Friday and I haven't solved either J nor CC
Misty you caught some drama but as is your wont, a Happy ending.
I never would have guessed that we were seeing life through the roach's eyes. Cafard? New one for me.
WC
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