Speccie: Trochaic
 

Chris o'Carroll carried our banner not once but twice, for he is also Smith. So our transatlantic flavour is back and the Brits this week are vanquished. Well done Chris!

The competition looks something we can all do. The Hiawatha metre is so easy you can churn it out all day - which Longfellow did, after all. Carroll (Lewis) has a marvellous poem about photography which is worth looking up.

No. 2653: Trochaic
You are invited to submit a poem, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, describing Hiawatha’s experiences at his computer (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 June.

Carroll's prose opening to "Hiawatha" is in the same meter.

Not quite on message perhaps:

Hiawatha’s Computer

Hiawatha from his teepee,
Squatting at his new computer,
Sends a steady stream of emails
Winging to the global village,
Words of wisdom transcendental:
Buy the shares in British Petrol.
Buy them by the hundred thousand.
Put your shirt on deep sea drilling.

Winging like a shower of arrows
To the weaklings and the women,
Give no ear to idle prattle,
Wind farms, wave power, solar panels.
Spurn the devil. Put thy trust in
Technological advancement.
Follow Microsoft and Google.
Buy more shares in British Petrol.

John, I can't make the second line work because I give cross-legged three syllables. If you want to make sure that muppets like me don't lose the plot so early on, you'd have to change it to "cross-legg'd" or express his position otherwise.

Also, you're using "sat" to mean sitting, rather than the past tense that sprang first to my mind, making line 3 sound wrong "should it not be sending?" I asked myself.

What if he were "squatting at his new computer"?

Just thinking aloud, as it were, while squatting at mine.

Ann, I think I have perpetrated a scotticism. He was sat there doing bugger all. I shall adopt your excellent sugestion.

John,
I'm glad you've adopted Ann's excellent suggestion, but you need to insert a 'q' in 'squatting'.
I'm reelly good at poof- readig!

Thank you, Jnaye

By the store of Johnny Lulu
By the shiny Big Mac Donald’s
Lurks the dingy cyber-café
Haunt of four-eyed yenadizzes
Signers-on and city-clickers.

Here the noble Hiaw@ha
Beautiful with beads and tassels
Came to buy an hour’s amusement.
Sent his Minne-lol a message
All bedecked with smiley-faces
On the modern wand of willow.

Outside, many young kenabeeks
With the awful eyes of Pauguk
Clocked his beads and mocked his tassels
Called him poofter, kicked him shitless
Left him lying in the gutter.

By the desk of Hiawatha
On the screen his cursor traveled
In the window he was viewing
Flashed the face of Minnehaha
Streaming in a pixel head-dress
Down across a naked torso.
In the corner of the window
Blanks for writing Visa numbers
Flashed and Hiawatha fumbled
For his wallet from his pocket
Where he found the plastic writing
He could use so Minnehaha
Would not fade away and leave him
Like a camper in a wigwam
By the shores of Gitche Gummee
Beating shining Big-Sea-Water.

Can you tell that my "official" summer vacation has just begun? :)

HIAWATHA JOINS FACEBOOK

Glitchy software made him gloomy,
But his mission lay before him:
At an antiquated laptop,
On a modem that was dial-up,
To defeat the website filter
That his granny had installed there;
To mark “login” box, then “password”
Like the pale bark of the birch-tree
With his art of picture-writing,
So his friend request could reach her—
Minnie H. from North Dakota,
Savvy owner of an Ipad,
She with callused thumbs from texting.
Would she add him or ignore him?
He clicked “like” for Redskins fan page
As his granny lay there snoring . . .