[Douglas G. Brown]

Boogity, boogity,
Storm of the century
Plows irresistibly
Up the East Coast.

Meteorologically,
Frankenstorm might just be
Turning New York, or
Mass. into toast.

[Roger Slater]

Yes, it might be. What could be funnier?

There's another news story here in New York about a nanny that killed two children. Maybe you could amuse us with a rhyme about that as well.

[Douglas G. Brown]

Roger,
I do not mean to make light of the danger, but as a cautionary warning. I have been outside all day, "battening down the hatches", and stocking up on supplies and fuel. It seems that everyone in this area is getting prepared.
I hope that it dissipates itself at sea, or at least does not hit heavily populated areas too hard. But, modern day computer forecasts do tend to lend an air of grim inexorability to such events, that did not exist 30 or 40 years ago.

[Ann Drysdale]

Oh, Roger, that's tad harsh. I was smiling to myself as I read the poem because I'd been thinking how much of a leveller Nature can be, how the focus changes from political storms to real ones and how poetry copes.

I know what you mean though. Some time ago I answered a "fear" challenge with a hard look at my own coulrophobia. I was so scared of what I wrote that I hid it for a "cooling-off period" (it dealt with paedophilia in the persona of the funny man whom parents unaccountably trust). Now we are going through a scandal in the UK and I have decided that I won't jump on the bandwaggon and wave it. I'd thought of testing it on "metrical" but the thought of being judged to have done so opportunistically stayed my submit button. And I didn't want to consider NVN for reasons that are largely in accord with yours.

Storms, in my view, are fairer game than individual political figures.

I think that we have the makings of an interesting thread here, but not sure if it belongs on D&A, the merry ethos of which is precious to me. What do our moderators think?

[John Whitworth]

It's OK with me. The merry ethos will continue unabated even if not on this thread. But, as Bertie Wooster says, 'into each life some rain must fall'. I am sure someone else said it first and I am sure you, Ann, will know who.

[Ann Drysdale]

Longfellow.

[Mary McLean]

My family is in the path too (ironically my sister Sandy is most at risk) but I think it's fair game. It would be more sympathetic if you replace Mass with 'me', but I guess not if it isn't true. I would also replace New York with Manhattan for the meter and alliteration.

Now I want to read Ann's poem!

[Chris O'Carroll]

Making light of potential catastrophe does not seem morally offensive to me. I mean, if we can't laugh about the fact that we're all going to die someday and suffer in the meantime, what can we laugh about?

But I take a much more uncompromising line on the formal demands of the double dactyl. While "meteorology" is a double dactylic word, "meteorologically" has eight syllables and requires some serious elision to shoehorn it into the meter: mee tee ruh loj ik lee. Somebody else has already pointed out that your line 7 is a syllable short, and "might just be" in line 6 might just be a little bit of metrical padding.

Furthermore, although I understand that "toast" in the final line is a colloquialism that shouldn't be taken too literally, the term seems out of place here. It's intense heat that turns bread into toast, not high wind, rain, and snow.

So the problem for me isn't that the poem jokes about something that isn't really funny. (Lots of good comedy, maybe most good comedy, is about stuff that's not funny.) The problem is that it does its joking without the lapidary deftness that's so essential in a compact light verse form.

[Roger Slater]

I would have thought I had as much bad taste as anyone, but it seems to me that when a tragedy is in the process of unfolding, with forty people already dead and at least several more dead people to be expected in the coming days, not to mention all the evacuations and property damage, that joking about it can be excused only if you come up with something so very clever that it's easy to see why you could not resist. But this little ditty isn't funny enough to overcome its edgy refusal to take anything but humor from tragedy.