Ode to My Two Torn Blouses

 Last week, I was looking for something at the back of my closet.  Of course, I did not find it but I did come across two shirts I had been very fond of and forgotten I had.  One was white with flowers and the other was blue, a gift from my sister Andrea.  Pleased to have something "new" to wear, I wore the blue one to work with a cardigan and when I got home I saw the shirt had split under the arm (luckily, my office is so cold I had not removed my sweater).  Undaunted, I put on the other shirt the next morning and it tore before I even left the house!  Neither seems very fixable, which made me sad, although I guess they were at least ten years old.  I thought about writing an ode to my two torn blouses, then I wondered if that's the sort of thing ChatGBT does.  Yes, it is - how crazy!  As a joke, I found the website and entered a longish sentence about the items, and see what happened:  

Massachusetts Election Haiku

Question 1

Better access to
Nurses is preferred until
Fear of high costs equals No


Question 2

Repeal Citizens
United so Koch Brothers
Can’t buy elections


Question 3

Discrimination
Is wrong when based on gender
Or any other time

or

Discrimination
(Gender-based identity)
Must be prevented

(Q3 needs work: the longer words are a challenge)


Early Voting

Early voting’s great
But even Nate Silver lacks
Knowledge who will win


Voting

Why don’t people vote?
When so many fought so hard
For the privilege

On Election Day
The Bay State will lead the way
Repudiating Trump

Will you vote today?
Send a message to DC
That hate won't prevail

Man in the White House
Is more appalling each day
Not my President

Politics is grim
Root root root for the Red Sox
Escape ‘till November


Midterms

If the Midterms fail
To send the needed message
We’ll feel even worse





It's harder than it looks!   Anyone want to join in?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci - Keats Blog Tour

In the Georgette Heyer novels I love so much there are several mentions of the dangerous Lord Byron, but he had several contemporaries, known as the Romantic Poets, not all of whom had Byron’s entrée to ton society.  One such was John Keats (1795-1821), humbly born, and orphaned relatively young.  He took up medicine as a career, but his love of beauty and literature had found expression in poetry by his late adolescence.  Inspired by Spenser’s Faerie Queen, he entered “a new world of bright colour and honied language, of romantic adventure and chivalric devotion far above the level of actual life,” according to one biographer, Aileen Ward, and wrote his first poem.  

Keats' first poem was published in 1816, and my favorite, La Belle Dame San Merci, was written in 1819, early in his sadly short career (just two years later, he died of tuberculosis, the family disease).