Yes, this is great fun, Richard. I like it a lot. I enjoyed the whole thing, but I agree with others that some pruning of the townspeople’s reactions would probably benefit the poem. Partly because I found the opening to be particularly sharp and feel that it may get a bit lost by the time the reader gets through all of those (very clever, and important) reactions.
And I love how the poem ended. There’s an element of The Elephant in the Village of the Blind (meets Sunny Prestatyn? haha) about the poem that is very satisfying in this context—that lack of understanding their own children, not knowing what they are capable of, what’s going on under their noses, etc, because their perspectives are limited. With that in mind, if you choose to do some pruning, I would leave the responses/actions that are most connected to their occupations. Fine work, and, as mentioned, I enjoyed this quite a bit.
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