The trouble with this sort of thing is that it is so easy to do. I once did a jolly good one on how to boil an egg. There is no space for the metrically ingenious. Auden never tried it and there has to be a reason for that.

All the postings so far are good. The winners will just be those that Lucy happens to like. Having said that, I can't help feeling that Julie and Ann touch the most bases so far.

Congratulations to Chris on his double-header!

I'm not a very high-tech type, so I had to keep it simple on this one.

Hiawatha bought an apple,
not the kind that hangs from branches,
but a new and strange invention
bought with many strings of wampum.
With the apple came a mouse pad,
not the kind that's made of mouse pelt,
but a new and strange invention
with a mouse to run across it.
Day and night did Hiawatha
strive to overcome the apple,
mastering the mouse and mouse pad,
gazing in its eye fluorescent.
Till at last he cried “Eureka!
I have overcome the apple!
Now we need not write on birch-bark.
Now we'll send each other e-mail!”

I like Ann's very much -- it's violent and fun.

Nice one, Gail

Hiawatha bought a mini
Laptop he could take to meetings
Using it for notes and email,
Not to mention voice recordings
(Always, though, with full disclosure).
Soon he based his life upon it,
Never took a step without it,
Never left it home a minute,
Never looked men in their faces,
Always needed to be checking
Something vital in a window.
Then one day the thing malfunctioned,
Crashed and left him helpless, flailing.
With a rueful, sighing chuckle
Hiawatha saw the humor,
Named his laptop Minnehaha.

By the Bay near San Francisco,
with its wigwam pyramidal,
in the Valley Silicon’ish,
built of lucre made from ether,
Hiawatha had a venture.
There he soared the dot-com bubble,
like the roaring Yahoo, Cisco,
rode the NASDAQ, strode the FTSE,
burned like WorldCom, fell, as Nortel.
So he paddled further westward,
where he spends his days now, phishing,
spamming, scamming, cyber-texting,
Greetings, I’m a prince from Lagos . . .
Hi! I’ve got a flat to let you . . .
send a Western Union transfer . . .
claim your prize by money order . . .

-- Frank

It is not only Hiawatha who has problems with computers. At Lighten Up Online all our email addresses have been pirated by spammers. This means that several of its contributors may find that their service providers have either sent all my communications to their Spam folders or simply stopped them from being received at all. This seems to have affected the USA in particular and, I suspect, for some time. I shall shortly be emailing contributors using my hereto non-buggered-up personal address, then setting up new email systems. My apologies for the shambles -- and just as we were getting a really strong USA representation. Please do no give up in exasperation.

In the meantime :--

Old Nokomis, high-tech hacker,
doctors Minnehaha’s emails
sent to lovesick Hiawatha:
forwards them to One-Eyed Ferret,
nerdy brave in next door tepee.
One-Eyed Ferret gets impression
Minnehaha loves him deeply,
wants to sleep beneath his blanket,
get her hands upon his wampum,
click “Delete” on Hiawatha.
Hiawatha he use firewall --
bonfire, matches, smoke-stained blanket --
handed down by low-tech forebears.
Him make smoke of next door’s Amstrad.
One-Eyed Ferret reads the signal.
Old Nokomis gets the message.

trochaic
 

Congratulations to Chris O'Carroll on his Hiawatha win.

Congratulations as well to Basil and to Julie Kane. Sorry to hear that Ann and Martin Parker just missed.

Susan