A Poem or Two

I don’t know how you celebrated Thanksgiving, but I had my daughter, son-in-law and grandson over to our new house for dinner. We even used the good china and silverware that only gets put out for special occasions. It hasn’t been on our table in years, and my wife spent the better part of Wednesday polishing that silverware.

The special dinner is my inspiration for today’s column. It is actually not a column so much as it is a borrowed poem from my favorite dead poet, Strickland Gillilan (1869-1954). I’ve used his poetry before, but I don’t recall ever doing this one, his recollection of a special dinner in the high society of New York. Here it is.

Which Fork?

Some persons yearn for knowledge
Of the kind you get at college;
Some long for musty facts from days agone;
Some hunger to be knowing
What the future will be showing,
While others watch the present humming on.
But when I’m called out to dinner
By some plutocratic sinner
Who was always in the social swimming pool,
I would give a whole diploma,
E’en my college bred aroma,
I would give it all and gladly be a fool—
I would give my evening clothes,
And the joy that ebbs and flows,
When I hear the mellow popping of the cork,
Were I not always forgetting
One small thing that keeps me fretting—
If I only could recall
“Which fork?”

There’s quite a row beside me,
But the wo of woes betide me,
If I can ever get them sorted out;
For each one has its duty
Just as each its dainty beauty—
The oyster one is three-tined, short and stout;
But the rest—they have me guessing
In a manner most distressing,
And I’d almost trade my hope of future joy
For a chance to eat again
In that farmhouse dull and plain
With the tools I used to handle when a boy.
For I’m sure I’ll never learn,
Through I yearn and yearn and yearn,
Though I spend a dozen seasons in New York,
Just which trident’s next in line;
So from soup to nuts to wine
I am haunted by the thought,
“Which fork?”

Mr. Gillilan is also the correct author of the world’s shortest poem, which is often wrongly attributed to Ogden Nash under a different title, “Fleas.” The correct name and poem are:

On the Antiquity of Microbes

Adam
Had ‘em.

I hope your Thanksgiving Day was as pleasant as mine.