I’m told they take to counting sheep;

And even grown-up Dads and Mothers

Fall asleep, like many others,

By the curious device

Of seeing sheep before their eyes.

But when a lamb is sent to bed,

And cannot get to sleep, instead,

How – does anyone suppose –

Can he bring himself to doze?

The answer is – as any sheep’ll

Tell you – it’s by counting people!

For sheep consider people are

The oddest animals by far;

With only half as many feet

As any others that they meet;

And heads so high up in the air

That one can hardly see they’re there!

And heaven knows how they can eat,

With mouths so far above their feet;

Or be so pitifully dull

Without a decent fleece or wool;

Nor why their second legs reside

Like penguins’ – useless at their side!

So, given people are so odd,

The journey to the land of Nod

Is quite a cosy pleasure when

A lamb compares himself to men;

And, counting them, he drifts to sleep

With gratitude that he’s a sheep!

                    _____________

( from ‘Bertie and the Younger Set’)

Of how Odysseus and his men,

Vanquishing their Trojan foes,

Hit problems getting home again;

With loyal Penelope beginning

Those formidable feats of spinning.

The way old Homer hypes the story 

–  Wily Odysseus in the running

   For the epic heights of glory,

  And unprecedented cunning –

Belies what all the facts suggest.

This hero was a fool, at best!

His saga is an endless list

Of stumbling blindly into scrapes;

Depending, as is blithely missed,

On gods or sheep for his escapes.

The gods, of course, can share the glory,

But sheep – well, that’s another story!

And yet, could anyone deny

Odysseus narrowly survived

That Cyclops of the baleful eye,

Because resourceful sheep contrived

To give this stupid Greek a ride,

Clinging to their underside?

Take Jason with his Golden Fleece.

It shows, too, the same old deep

Unwritten truth of Ancient Greece –

Scratch the Man, and there’s the Sheep!

Though men, in that as every age,

Have hogged the centre of the stage.

So, what a difference there would be

In how the chronicles might show it,

If all these tales of history

Were written by some ovine poet!

And if we had the sheep-side view

On what blind Homer thought he knew.

             ________________          

 (  from ‘Bertie and the Younger Set’ )

So, anchoring beside the shore,
Columbus went off to explore,
No doubt thinking – I would fancy –
That he was somewhere up the Yangtse.

But back on board the boat, I’m told,
Were left in the deserted hold
A cow, a chicken and a sheep,
Which Ancient Mariners would keep
To supplement their meager ration,
Before the deep-freeze came in fashion.
This was, of course, before the days
Of Ready-Mix and Take Aways.

The sheep, the chicken and the cow
Were feeling not-too-well by now,
What between Columbus’ driving
And their prospects of surviving;
And felt they’d rather risk a rumpus
Than Christopher’s eccentric compass
And his tendency to steer
The wrong way round the hemisphere.

And so the sheep and cow and hen
Never went to sea again;
And when Columbus sailed away
Deprived him of his supper-tray;
And, settling for their novel station,
Became the Founders of a Nation.

The history books have never said it –
The Pilgrim Fathers got the credit –
But, I would like the world to know,
The turkey and the buffalo
Were just a natural survival
From this earlier arrival;
Their very gobble, groan and wheeze
Clearly Hispano-Portuguese.

And, as for what befell the sheep,
No need to lose a lot of sleep,
Trying to trace the mixed-up line
Of this ancestor of mine.
He headed sou-sou-west and through
The continent to found Peru;
And, finding that the air was calmer,
Happily became a llama.

              ___________________

( from  ‘Bertie and the Younger Set’ )

                                  And all roads lead to London and St Pauls,

                                  Through miles of salmon sandwiches and pies,

                                  And sticky fingered kids in village halls;

                                  Adding their raucous voices to the cheers

                                  Through raspberry blancmange and ginger beers.

                                  When Sunday-suited pensioners, impatient,

                                  Chafe at the festive tables for their teas,

                                  With talk of Jubilees and Coronations,

                                  Before the rheumatism got their knees;

                                  Hoping the endless pictures on the telly

                                  Will soon give way to sausage  rolls and jelly.

                                  When debutantes , all caviare and champers,

                                  Hang from their eyries down the Royal Way;

                                  Hired, complete with Fortnum-Mason hampers,

                                  By Daddy at a thousand quid the day;

                                  Tipsily consumed with trepidation

                                  At one more Prince removed from circulation.

                                 The Distinguished with their Lady Eminences,

                                 Are  jostling for position in the pews,

                                 Offering best profiles to the lenses

                                 In their bid to make the television news;

                                 Repressing much annoyance at the longer

                                 Exposure for the  up-start King of Tonga.

                                 While Dad has got his feet up on the fender,

                                 A pint of bitter underneath his chair,

                                 Settling for a God-Almighty bender

                                 As his contribution to the great affair;

                                 Sharing a prince’s hope that surely soon

                                 The Queen will let them start the honeymoon.

                                                        _______________

From ‘Bertie at the Royal Wedding’

(also includes: ‘ Among Their Souvenirs’; ‘To the Manor Born’; ‘A Bride’s Lament’; ‘Affairs of State’;  ‘The Prince and the President’s Wife’; ‘ Uninvited Guest’;  ‘The Royal Bed-Warmers’.)

( from ‘Bertie at the Royal Wedding’ )

Elspeth-Elizabeth’s blue-blooded Pa
Was appropriate match for her regal Mama,
He from the line of Great Rameses VII,
She from the Twistleton-Tuppes of Dunleven .

Elspeth-Elizabeth’s grooming and poise
Marked her apart from the girls and the boys;
Showed in the tone of her elegant baa
From the Debutantes’ Lambery, Cheltenham Spa.

Elspeth-Elizabeth’s mother’s desire,
After bringing her out at the Trials in the Shire
Was to get her to move in desirable quarters
And mix in a suitable circle of daughters.

Now all of their loftiest hopes are requited,
For Elspeth-Elizabeth’s just been invited
To attend at that most elevated of matings,
As Lady Diana’s First Lady-in-Waiting.

( from ‘Bertie at the Royal Wedding’ )

For which, by centuries-old Decree,
I munch her far-flung pastures free,
Delighting in the ageless status
Of Keeper of the Monarch’s Gaiters.

So, fresh from having penned another
Paean for some Queenly Mother,
I must, before the ink is dry,
Start again for Charles and Di,
Assured by Laureate, Sir John,
He feels in no way put-upon,
He’ll no doubt spin the needful rhyme
For what’s to come in nine-months’ time.

Meanwhile lets get the Cotswolds humming
Some ovine epithalamiumings .

( from ‘Bertie at the Royal Wedding’ )

It was from us Theocritus
Learned his choriambics;
And we could scan, before a man,
Trochaics and iambics.
The dithyramb is to us lambs,
What fishes are to water;
And to the ewe, a clerihue’s
Just what her mother taught her.

So lambs at play became the way
The great Earth Mother chooses
To make the shepherd wish to sing
The music of The Muses.
And in our fey, eurhythmic way,
Although they may not know it,
We lambs began converting man
From shepherd into poet.

_________________________

From ‘Bertie and the Younger Set’.

Yet, in so doing, he ignores
The message of his metaphors;
Which, you may notice, seldom find
Much inspiration from mankind.
Their writers, for the most part, feast
On nature, botany and beast,
Of which their literature is full,
Not people – infinitely dull.

Thus Wordsworth wanders like a cloud,
Or talks of daffodils aloud;
Budding poets tell their tales
In terms of larks or nightingales.
Not one would choose to waste his pen
On boring similes of men,
Nor find his inspiration tending
Towards metaphors of man ascending.

For all his elegance of phrase,
There’s little that his language says
To rival how the blackbirds sing
Their perfect consonance of spring;
Nor how the waking robin gives,
Without recourse to adjectives,
Such evocation of the dawn,
In one short cadence on the lawn.

What animals and flowers hear
Defeats man’s onomatopoea,
While pyramids of words conceal
Some lost capacity to feel.
For every new-born lamb well knows,
Without the benefits of prose,
That singing in creation’s song
Needs feeling deeper than the tongue.

( from Bertie and the Younger Set..)

A yuppie at three, a financial degree,
And an M.B.A. summa cum laude;
Owned a tanker or two, and unregistered crew,
With a wily old camel from Saudi.

Made a fortune at four with a kangaroo boar
Into lager and brewing down under;
Put it all into junk, bought a sizeable chunk
Of Manhattan with part of the plunder.

Was Sir Robbie at five, with a stake in a live
Satellite channel, but greedier
To be Lord Rob MacGrimes of the Guardian or Times,
Or some other respectable media.

Found it stuck in some throats to mix sheep with the goats
Of the peerage, invoking a writ on
The affront to the peace of ennobling the fleece
The Lord Chancellor’s bottom should sit on.

The Establishment won, as it mainly has done,
With another sheep wiser if wearier;
Though a press report moots Robbie’s still in cahouts
With some privatised bear in Siberia.

( from The Bertie Ramsbottom Book of Improbable Sheep )