24 June 2018
· A limerical biography of a good friend ·
People think of limericks as silly poems, but they don’t have to be. A while back I took my Sonnet 73 and rewrote it as a limerick. It was more of a challenge than starting from scratch, but that was the point of doing it. It turned out reasonably well.
This limerick is not silly. The banana slug is another matter.
- There was a young man, Jeff Falzone
- Left the midwestern roots he’d outgrown
- California held more
- Than home’s riverine shore
- On the ocean, the sparkling sun shone
- So to college at UCSC
- Psycholinguistics, psychology
- Then grad school. After that
- The career these begat
- Helping others, with kind empathy
- Work in Oregon came to fruition
- Leaving time for a second position
- So he got a job here
- And that led to de Vere
- From a nagging Who’s Shakespeare? suspicion
- There were too many holes in the story
- Of the self-taught Warwickshireman’s glory
- Jonson’s Soule of the Age?
- Bard of poem and stage?
- Common sense countered myth trite and hoary
©2010 Win Goodbody
- As Jeff watched OSF’s dramas played,
- In his mind new conclusions were weighed
- Stories so full of truth
- Biographical sleuthing
- Found answers well fit to persuade
- Learned by heart all the Sonnets, did he
- Helped by friends in ACNGB
- 3D-printed a die
- Roll a number, reply!
- One to one-fifty-four, correctly
- Many people say Oxford’s not who
- Earned the credit that Shake-Speare is due
- Yet his life fired his art
- If you keep them apart
- Who comes out the real loser? Just you
- But without proof like manuscripts (dated)
- Authorship spats go on unabated
- Jeff’s not bothered by this
- Peace of mind’s not amiss
- Shakespeare, living, is what’s celebrated
©2017 @edevere17 all rights reserved