Will you share your favorite light verse?

Question

From limericks to Ogden Nash to Edward Gorey to Shakespeare, if it's funny--or if it's just really good--please share it with me! Thanks.

Answer 1

I love Shel Silverstein. Here is one of my favorites:

Forgotten Language

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?

Answer 2

Dorothy Parker had several short and humorous poems:

News Item
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet --
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

I also like an untitled one by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It requires a bit more thought, but it's the perfect slam to an over-confident man.

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Finally, as you mentioned, Ogden Nash has some of the funniest poems around.

Song of the Open Road
I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

The Cow
The cow is of bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other is milk.

Reflexions on Ice-Breaking
Candy
is dandy
But liquor
is quicker

Answer 3

Man's sole gesture of defiance,
Standing outside the beer parlour
After the requisite number of beers
Is trying to piss on the stars,
Failing magnificently.
-- Al Purdy

And after all, my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished,
Shall we say it was not love just because it perished.
-- can't remember source

We all sit in a circle and suppose
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
-- Robert Frost

Spending warm summer days indoors,
Writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg.
-- The Smiths

Hear the bells, the bells that ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen