Monday, August 14, 2017

Locale Hero

I think I’ve mentioned the excellent interstate pastime of seeing the names of imaginary celebrities on exit signs, like silent film stars Victoria Luxora and Darien Whitewater. Now there’s Amherst Oberlin, “The Blacksmith Poet,” once much-anthologized but today nearly forgotten. In the little New England town where he lived and died, he was less known for his verse than for his bespoke orthopedic horseshoes.

Here’s the first stanza of his best known work, “To a Daffodil:”

O how shall I sing of the daffodil
That blooms in yonder yard?
Its petals pale, its leaves a-dew,
It makes my pecker hard.

3 comments:

Aggie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Aggie said...

No "Locale Hero" (brilliant, by the way) from me this time around. All I have to offer is a "Lo-Cal Hero": Mahatma Gandhi.

Dave Maleckar said...

Right! Or So-Cal heroes, the LA Dodgers.