| The men who sell us cheeses,
Who deal out dope for sneezes And those who handle corner lots and blue sky min- ing stock, Who peddle books and papers And lightning rods and tapers, Are waiting now to greet us as we amble round the block. With faces kind and pleasant They hand us out a present, A calendar to warn us how the dizzy seasons whirl, All filled with days and weather, With moons and weeks together, And there upon the cover is the picture of a girl. Too soon are we encumbered With souvenirs unnumbered; The artists vie to please us with some forty kinds of style. Some long, and some are shorter Some narrow___kinda sorter___ But the girl upon the cover greets us with the same old smile. The futurists and cubists And some who must be rubists, Who wear a wisp of new mown hay within their tangled curls, Are drawing princely wages In quick, successive stages By furnishing variety in calendars and girls. Fair maids with auburn tresses And spangles on their dresses; Shy damsels wrapt in dimples___only this and nothing more; Sweet Janes in fuss and feather, 'Mid snow and stormy weather, And angels, clad in bath suits, sporting on the sandy shore. We like the girls___God bless 'em, Any way the artists dress 'em, We gladly post their pictures in the parlor or the hall; They grace our summer kitchen, With face and form bewitchin', And we want a half a dozen hanging on the bedroom wall. But we crave some variation In our scheme of decoration, We'd like to have a calendar to hang out in the shed, A straw stack or a plover Upon the painted cover, A forest fire or sunset, daubed in colors ruby red. Can't some one draw a smoke-stack, A hand car or a flapjack A mountain or a mole hill, a sawmill or a squirrel To decorate those doogies That show how tempus fuges? Just anything on earth except the picture of a girl. __Albert Stroud. |
Verdigris Valley Verse
Albert Stroud
(Coffeyville, Kansas: The Journal Press. 1917)
Pages 94-95
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