Almost missed it

April is National Poetry Month. I didn't really mark it this year...busy with other things. But I do like poetry, we did a lot with it when I was in school. One of my favorite assignments from fifth grade was when we made chapbooks (though they didn't call them that, that's what they were) of poems we liked - we were encouraged to use our best penmanship and also to illustrate them if we wanted to.

They were talking about National Poetry Month on the news last night so I pulled a book of it off the shelf. I was actually looking for the Ogden Nash poem To a Lady who Thinks She is Thirty, which is one of my favorite poems, but I couldn't find it.

Instead, I found another one of his, which struck me right now because I've been feeling some of the things it talks about. It's more in the typical humorous Ogden Nash "doggerel" vein than the poem linked above, but still, as the cool kids say, "I know that feel, bro."

So, here is a poem, to get in just under the wire on National Poetry Month:

Kind of an Ode to Duty
By Ogden Nash
O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?
Why art thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?
Why art thou fifty per cent martyr
And fifty-one per cent Tartar?

Why is it thy unfortunate wont
To try to attract people by calling on them either to leave undone the deeds they like, or to do the deeds they don’t?
Why are thou so like an April post-mortem
On something that died in the ortumn?
Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me?
Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me?

Thou so ubiquitous,
And I so iniquitous.
I seem to be the one person in the world thou art perpetually preaching at who or to who;
Whatever looks like fun, there art thou standing between me and it, calling yoo-hoo.
O Duty, Duty!
How noble a man should I be hadst thou the visage of a sweetie or a cutie!
Wert thou but houri instead of a hag
Then would my halo indeed be in the bag!
But as it is thou art so much forbiddinger than a Wodehouse hero’s forbiddingest aunt
That in the words of the poet, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, this erstwhile youth replies, I just can’t.