Doggerel of the Day: For All the Creatures

Doggerel: "Loosely styled and irregular in measure...marked by triviality or inferiority" (Merriam-Webster). Don't say you weren't warned.

This is a doggerel post. Methinks
Why isn't there a post for "catterel"?
Why is it only the dogs that boast?
Why should the cats be left unsung
With nothing for the feline tongue?

And what about the sheep?
So silly, so dumb and so daft,
And yet, worthy of poetic craft.
Chaucer, Spenser, Blake thought so.
Even Shakespeare had a go.

The chickens are starting another riot
And Chinggis is strutting his stuff,
Even the hens are not-so-quiet
As they lay, while I'm counting, the eggs
It seems there are never enough.

So, back to the dogs again,
Staunch defenders of the farm terrain.
Keeping us safe, both night and day
With incessant loud barking along the way,
I guess that's why they get all the glory
And have bad poetry named after them--end of story.

A couple of years ago, late at night, on the way back up to the house after feeding the sheep, I tripped on the concrete and brick steps up from my barn. Ended up in a heap, shoved my left hand down in a bed of poison ivy, and knocked over—and had land across the back of my head—a rather heavy (and full) flower pot. I may have knocked myself out, but I must have rolled over at some point because when I came to, Odo the Great Pyrenees was expressing enormous concern on my behalf, and was doing what I have come to believe was “doggy CPR” on my chest, stampeding back and forth in truly alarming ways.

I decided to get up before he suffocated or choked me. And when I got inside I was horrified by the amount of blood I saw in the mirror and on the front and back of my clothes. Checked my pupils. Took a cold shower to slow the bleeding down and went to bed. Woke up in considerable pain, and went to the doctor. Broken wrist, and a couple of contusions, including one on the noggin. Oh, and the poison ivy.

I survived. Thanks, I’ve always believed, largely to the dog.

P.S. Eat your heart out, William McGonagall. (One of my proudest literary possessions is a slim volume, a fairly early edition, of some of his appalling output.) Herewith the first two stanzas of "The Tay Bridge Disaster":

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say—
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”

It goes on. And on. And on.

This is today's "Doggerel of the Day" post. If you'd like to contribute your own (you can borrow someone else's bad verse, or even someone's excellent verse, no need to write your own, unless you're a glutton for punishment), the sign-up sheet is here.