Photo of Pelikan fountain pen by Flickr user David Blackwell. Published under Creative Commons license.
We are pleased to announce a new regular feature on our website: The Watershed Post News Poem. Every week, we'll be bringing you some form of ode, lyric, ditty, verse, limerick, sonnet, or (if we get really ambitious) villanelle based on current news events in the region. (For those of you who may be wondering: Yes, we're massive geeks; no, we have no shame.)
Fans of our weekly radio show, the Watershed Post Half-Hour News Hour, may have heard a few of our quasi-literary stylings already. Today, for our poetical web debut, we bring you an Ode to the Feral Pig. (And if you're wondering what feral pigs have to do with news in the Catskills, check out this recent news item from our digital pages.)
Without further ado:
Ode to the Feral Pig
Alas, say New York's politicians,
We're too broke to buy ammunition.
But, Empire State, when pigs go feral,
We ignore them at our peril.
For pigs are not like sheep or cows
When they get free, they cause a row,
Intelligent and plucky louts,
They tear up fields with their snouts,
Are prone to having lots of babies,
Susceptible to pseudorabies,
Armed with tusks more sharp than dull
Grinning from iron-plated skulls,
And when they're bred with Russian boar
The skirmish swells into a war.
Creatures are lovely wild and free
But farmer and forester agree:
Concerning porkers on the lam
We'd rather they were slabs of ham.
