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The Old Man and the Mouse: A Sicilian Folktale

An old man poured a glass of milk, and left it on the table.
A small mouse came and drank it up, as much as he was able.
The man returned, and when he saw the mouse right by the glass
He took a knife and clipped his tail just where it touched his ass.
The mouse cried out “Oh please, dear sir, return my tail to me!
I cannot do without the thing—I beg you, hear my plea!”
The old man said “You want your tail? Replace the milk right now!”
The mouse asked “How can I do that?” The old man said “A cow
Is what you need. Go ask a cow.” The mouse then left to look.
He found a sleepy cow and said “Dear cow, some milk I took.
Please give me a replacement to appease an angry party.
He’ll then return my missing tail, and I’ll be hale and hearty.”

The cow said “If you want my milk, I need to have some hay.
Once you bring a load of it, I’ll give you milk today.”
The mouse asked “Where can I find that?” The cow said “See that field?”
Go ask the field to give you hay, and then we’ll make a deal.”

The mouse went to the spacious field, and said “It’s hay I need!
If you give hay, I’ll bring it to the cow to give her feed.
She’ll then give me milk to bring to satisfy a geezer,
And he’ll return my tail to me. Please help this little cheeser!”
The field replied “I’m parched and dry. Bring water in a pail.
When I have had a long deep drink, I’ll help you without fail.”
The mouse asked “Where can I get that?” The field said “See that well?
Go ask the well for water, and I’m sure that he will tell
You how to get some water to fulfill your desperate aim.
A well is where the water is, so go there for the same.”
The mouse went to the well and cried “I need some water now!
I need to pay the field for hay to give a hungry cow.
The cow will give me milk to please a man whose milk I stole.
And he’ll then give my tail to me, to make my body whole!”

The well replied “I’m in bad shape—my bricks and stones are broken.
Go get a mason for repairs, and I’ll send down my oaken
Bucket to bring water up.” The mouse ran off to find one.
He came across a mason, and he seemed to be a kind one.
He asked the mason “Please come fix a well that’s falling down—
The well will give me water when his structure’s strong and sound.
I’ll give the water to the field, who then will give me hay.
I’ll give that to the cow who then will give me milk in pay.
The milk I’ll give to that old man who left me decaudated
(A fate that’s rendered me bereft, and one that I have hated).”

The mason laughed, and then replied “Before I work for you,
I need some breakfast. How about a nice fried egg or two?”
The mouse asked “Where can I find eggs?” The mason said “A hen
Is what you need. She’ll lay you some, and then come back again.”
The mouse sought out a sitting hen, and laid the matter out:
“Dear hen, please lay some eggs for me. In fact I have no doubt
That you can do it. Eggs I’ll bring, and give them to a guy
Who says he’ll fix the well for me. Oh hen, I hope you’ll try!
Once he’s fixed, the well will give me water for the field.
The field will blossom into growth, and hay will be its yield.
I’ll then feed it to the cow, and she will pump her udder
And fill a glass for the old man, and I will cease to shudder,
Since he’ll return my tail to me, and this bad dream will close—
I will be complete once more, and get deserved repose.”

The hen replied “I gladly would give you what you desire
But you must offer me some grain; my stomach is on fire
With hunger, and I cannot lay as long as this is true—
Get me grain and then I’ll try to see what I can do.”
The mouse replied “But where’s the grain? Just where can I find that?”
The hen said “Ask a farmer there—the one with the straw hat.”

The mouse went to the farmer and said “Farmer, give to me
Some grain so I can feed a hen who won’t lay eggs for free.
Once I get eggs I’ll give them to a mason for his trouble,
He’ll fix a well and then I’ll take the water on the double
To wet a field and get some hay to feed a swelling cow
Who’ll pay me back in milk I’ll use to settle up a row
I had with some old man who sliced the tail right off my rear.
I want to get it back again—to me my tail is dear.”

The farmer answered “If you help with fixing up my shed,
I’ll give you a full sack of grain. Now here’s the task ahead:
The roof is leaky and we need to patch it up with tar.
If you just bring the shingles up, I’ll follow not too far
Behind you, and together we will tar and patch the roof—
That is, if you can labor hard, and give to me some proof
That you’re an honest worker who is really worth his pay.
After that, I’ll give you grain, and you can go your way.”

The mouse agreed, and both of them climbed up to do the job.
The roof was old and slippery. The mouse tripped on a gob
Of soft wet tar, and fell down to the overhanging ledge,
And he could not cling to the roof’s old cracked and rotting edge.
Below him sat a bubbling vat of black and smoking pitch—
He plummeted right into it and felt his body twitch
A few brief seconds as he gave a pitiful sad squeak.
That’s the only sound he made. He could not even speak.
The flames consumed him in a wink, reducing him to ash,
And life went on the same without him after that brief flash.

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A Brief Note

The ancient folktale behind this poem was told to me and my brother when we were children in the early 1950s. The one who told it to us was our maternal grandfather Rosario Previti (1882-1967), a Sicilian poet, translator, journalist, woodworker, and violin maker. He told us the story in Sicilian, but also translated it for us into English. We liked the tale so much that we insisted that he tell it to us every time we came to his home for a visit. He always obliged.

The Sicilian title of the folktale is U Vecchiu e lu Surci (The Old Man and the Mouse), and versions of it are told all over Italy and beyond. One delightful aspect of the story for children is the slow buildup of repetition as the mouse explains his needs to each living creature or inanimate object that he encounters in his futile search for milk. His final death is a passing philosophical afterthought, with no meaning except as a silent ratification of the ultimate hopelessness of all endeavor, and perhaps of life itself.

The poem is in iambic heptameter catalectic, with just a few headless lines and feminine endings. This kind of galloping rhythm is perfectly suitable to simple folkloric narrative. Rhyming couplets keep the reader’s attention, and the section divisions are arranged according to natural breaks or pauses in the narrative flow.

Vecchiu: Old Man. From the Late Latin veclus, a syncopated form of the diminutive noun vetulus (little old man). Standard Italian for “old man” is vecchio.

Surci: Mouse. From the Latin sorex, soricis (the small animal known as a shrew in English). The term was used in Late Latin and Proto-Romance for mouse, and has survived in this Sicilian reflex, and in the French souris. Standard Italian for “mouse” is topo.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

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27 Responses

  1. Mark Stellinga

    This reminds me of what’s going on in CA with ‘building permits’, Joe! Because of the mountain of red tape they’re being made to scale, some of those who lost their homes will be dead, I fear, before they’re replaced. This is quite the labor of love, and I can’t help but wonder how long it took to tie all these clever bits together! A really fun piece – 🙂

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Mark. California is now run by mentally deranged left-liberal religionists, so it’s unlikely any rebuilding will happen.

      As for the time it took me to write this poem, it was about two days, with a third day for touch-ups and revisions. It’s my most recent poem, and was composed late last month.

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    This is a fascinating tale told with great rhyming skills that with repetition and panache could only be told by someone like you with an innate sensitivity resulting from having such a wonderful source for such a vivid children’s story. Back in the 1950’s, we had older generations that remembered such stories and communicated them to us in the absence of things like computer games. My grandfather used to tell me tales of his younger days of homesteading on the prairie and other stories from previous generations. These stories need to be preserved, and you have done a fantastic job giving us an entertaining one.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Roy. That older generation still retained a great many stories and poems and folktales, most of which have been lost since then. All of my grandparents were born in the 19th century (1879, 1881, 1882, 1889), in a semi-feudal agrarian society that still depended heavily on oral culture

      Reply
  3. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Joe, I just love this brilliantly biting wake-up-call of a poetic Sicilian folktale. I love the way it delivers a potent jolt of reality wrapped up in whimsy. Its darkly comic chain of events and shocking finale is enough to rob any self-centered child of the fairytale fantasy that life revolves around them. It also tells them bad choices come with consequences – how alarming! It’s not that I don’t have any pity for the poor mouse – I adore him! Any mouse that can teach a child a valuable life lesson is a hero. I was going to suggest this poem was read in every school, but I’m certain there would have to be a safe space to run to, a pygmy therapy-goat to stroke, and several counselors on hand if my idea came to fruition. Joe, thank you!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Susan. In fact I do teach this folktale in my Classical Mythology section at Hunter College, by distributing a prose summary of it for discussion. My purpose is to introduce students to what is meant by a mythic narrative, and how such a narrative will make use of fantasy (a mouse that concocts complex plans, animals and inanimate objects that speak, and larger issues of life’s meaning) in order to create fictive mimesis.

      Hunter College has students from all over the world, and many of them told me that they had heard different versions of the tale in their countries. Russian students mentioned that in the Soviet Union the tale was altered to have a happy (and leftist) ending, with the mouse triumphant and all the social needs of the characters fulfilled. Typical of political delusion in a Communist state.

      I always tell my students this: “Are any of us any different from this mouse? Why are you sitting here in my lecture hall? You’re doing it to pass and go on to the next required class? You’re doing that to get a degree. You’re doing that to get a good job. You’re doing that to earn money. You’re doing that to buy a home in the suburbs. You’re doing that to be comfortable and have social status. You’re doing that to give your life meaning. And what’s the final result of all that striving? You wind up in a graveyard like everyone else.”

      Some students do get upset when I say that. When they complain, I just say “Grow up.”

      Reply
  4. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Dr. Salemi, three of my best military officer friends in the Army were Sicilian: Jim Coniglio out of Milwaukee, Ken Collucci out of Kansas City, and Sam Genovese out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. The first two were Phoenix program classmates with me at Fort Bragg. Sam taught me counterintelligence and later was in command of a unit while I was the XO. He told me he once took his wife to a restaurant in New York and everything was free because of his name. It turned out it was owned by another Sam Genovese and staff figured he must be his son.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      LTC Peterson — you were in the famed but mysterious and very hush-hush Phoenix Program? Wow! It’s clear you are not anyone to be messed with. I have been told by some veterans that we could have won the Vietnam war if the Phoenix Program had been expanded rather than heavily restricted by Washington moralists.

      My father was drafted in 1942 because he spoke Sicilian, and he went into G-2 to be an interrogator of POWs, a translator of captured documents, and a handler of allied Italian resistance partisans. In fact, the Army scoured all of the Italian neighborhoods of America to find military-age males who could speak Italian and its various dialects, so that Italian POWs could be interrogated and debriefed. You can consult my essay “Henny and Sal” here at the SCP archives (November 14, 2022) to read about his war experiences.

      Yes, if you are family, you will never be asked to pay in an Italian restaurant. My wife’s grandfather had a relative who owned a small place near where he lived, and this relative told him to show up anytime he wanted for a free meal.

      Reply
  5. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Dr. Salemi, I had been unaware of an Essay Archive until you mentioned it. There is a wealth of knowledge to be found. I avidly read your essay/article and could identify both with them and you. You were so accurate about the bonding and the veiled references. As Commander of a major debriefing (interrogation) unit, XO of one, and Ops Officer of the most secret one, I was one of the most experienced in the Army. Regarding the Phoenix Program, I wrote a book, “Fight of the Phoenix,” detailing aspects of the program and my experiences in Vietnam. I used FOIA to declassify a report on Viet Cong taxation of the South Vietnamese that was used by the CIA and us. I also was able to save some slips of paper on the daily briefings showing where, how, and how many the Viet Cong killed on a daily basis, such as school children from a village that would not come over to their side.

    Reply
  6. Brian Yapko

    Joe, I think this is a masterpiece. It is a marvel of tone, pacing, characterization and theatricality. It is the type of poem that demands to be read out loud and, unless I’m much mistaken, would actually make for an entertaining and fun performance or animation piece (even with the harsh ending.)

    It is a great joy to see the technique that has gone into this poem – the iambic heptameter (catalectic is a new term for me) really gives the poem (as you describe it) a galloping quality. That combined with the use of couplets (nothing better to maintain focus!) compels the reader to keep going as a breathless pace builds and builds. It’s exciting and fun.

    Now the content of the piece is obviously fixed since it is based upon a preexisting Sicilian folktale. Your ability to stray from the source material is limited. Ironically, however, that gives you additional freedom to focus on the other things – the meter, the language, the characterization, the pacing. This is an underdiscussed subject in poetry – not translation of foreign material but the poetic retelling of folktales and myths. It can seem limiting and yet it offers amazing new directions for the poet to go and, perhaps, a unique spin. Obliquely relevant is the story of songwriter Irving Berlin who Rodgers & Hammerstein as producers were trying to convince to write the score to Annie Get Your Gun. Berlin didn’t want to do it. He felt having to write songs for a preexisting plot and script would hinder his ability to write songs. He gave it a weekend to make the attempt and came back on Monday with four classic songs including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I tell this story just to validate the idea that sometimes having a restriction in content can open up new pathways to creativity. Adaptation. Your poem makes the most of this.

    The subject matter of The Old Man and the Mouse seems to tap into an archetypal form of storytelling as well – for lack of a better term, the “task and consequence” poem/song/play. I’m thinking of songs like “There’s a Hole in My Bucket” which requires a series of complications to be resolved before that hole can finally get fixed (which it never does.) This type of “task and consequence” drives the plot of Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” I’m also thinking of Plautus and the Plautine derived “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” which required the lead slave character, hankering for freedom, to please the master by getting him the girl who must be released from the next-door brothel which can’t happen unless she’s relieved of an engagement which can’t happen unless they can convince her general-fiance that she has plague… and on and on. This seems to me a subset of farce and your funny (yet tragic) poem seems to fit into this mode. That tragedy was striking. By the time we got to the last stanza I was really expecting a happy fairytale ending so I was shocked by the sudden twist of fate for that poor mouse. And after all those hard negotiations to make everything happen just so. But not every story has a happy ending and sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men do go astray.

    The language and tone are a marvel of sly humor with the occasional oversophisticated term to give this just enough of a mock-epic quality to highlight the absurdity of the situation and the mouse’s predicament. I must say, “decaudated” will stay with me a long time. Previously, my favorite form of brutalization was “defenestration.”

    Congratulations, Joe, on something I think is truly special. This is one of those poems I encounter which I sincerely wish I had written! You’ve set the bar very high.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, thank you for this extended comment. I could feign that I am humbled by this praise, but I won’t lie — I am truly elated by it. Your ability to critique a text is phenomenal, and is light years beyond jargon-laden, politicized critique that is now standard in scholarly journals.

      What you say about reading out loud is absolutely on target — the reason I and my brother always asked our grandfather to repeat the tale was the fact that as kids (seven and five years old) we were delighted by the rhythm and sound of the story in both Sicilian and English. The deliberately exaggerated repetitions, the buildup of tensions and expectations, the growing sympathy for the hapless mouse — all of this was irresistible to children, and proves that in fairy tales and folklore it is the oral and audible shape of a story, even more than its subject, that delights those who hear it. Think of the wonderfully long nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built.” It is linguistically delightful to recite the concatenation of persons and things that are repetitively described. And the “message” or “meaning” or “moral” of what that nursery rhyme recounts is utterly trivial and insignificant.

      Your mention of Irving Berlin’s hesitation to compose song lyrics for a preexisting script tells us something important about different ideas concerning “creativity.” Many writers affect to be “constrained” or “hobbled” by having to bend their skills to subjects that are not of their own creation. But a truly great writer like Berlin overcame that hesitation and produced the amazing songs of “Annie Get Your Gun.” Do you remember “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun”? When our family watched a TV presentation of “Annie” in the 1950s, we were all delighted beyond words with that song, and all the others, including the masterpiece “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

      The other idea of creativity is the Romantic one that everything you write has to be utterly original and the product of your own brain (even though many Romantic poets worked with inherited material and story lines). And to look at the subject from another angle, men who composed libretti for operas had the freedom to cook up whatever story they liked to fit the previously composed musical scores.

      The material that Homer used to put together the Iliad was centuries old when he handled it. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is nothing but a collection of ancient myths. But both men reworked the inherited stories and transfigured them with their own genius. Scores of poems here at the SCP are based on history, or older legends, or cultural artifacts, rather than on unique personal experience. The problem with modernism (and its theoretical offshoots) is that it reflexively favors personal poems and confessional poems and solipsistic poets to the exclusion of all others.

      It’s certainly true that fairy tales and folklore often have stories of difficulty, outrageous demands, and overly complex requirements for attaining a desired end. My wife is now reading a collection of Italian fairy tales, from all the various provinces of Italy, and she has mentioned how frequently the tale is about some unfortunate character in a rough spot, with limited options, who needs to satisfy the demands of some tyrannical authority. As you have said, “task and consequences.”

      Brian, thank you again. I hope I can live up to the standards you have mentioned.

      Reply
    • Brian Yapko

      Joe, a couple of additional thoughts: on reflection, I think the concept I intended for your poem, Forum, Hole in the Bucket etc. would be more like “Task and Complications” rather than “Task and Consequences.” The fun in such farcial pieces is the many hoops the protagonist must jump through with increasingly elaborate obstacles which complicate the task. I suppose a modern corollary might be the “heist” film in which a series of difficult sequential tasks must be completed until the final goal can be reached. The audience fun is in seeing these things checked off one by one.

      The other thing: Those four songs that Irving Berlin wrote over one weekend to see if he could even do the Annie Get Your Gun project were: “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and “The Girl That I Marry.” Any one of these songs would make a songwriter’s career. Obviously, Berlin was a skillful enough artist that he could be inspired by ideas which were not original to him but which propelled him into new and exciting ways of composing! Another corollary to this story: Rodgers and Hammerstein PRODUCED Annie Get Your Gun rather than write it. They had the discernment to recognize that their particular style of writing and composing would not have been right for the property. Sometimes it takes a great deal of poetic skill to know when a subject or form is wrong for the writer and should be tackled by someone else.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Brian, I never thought of the “heist” film as a kind of parallel to folktales that have a complicated series of steps to be done, but I think you are on to something. It’s true that a good heist film (like the 1956 “The Killing” with Sterling Hayden) keeps you on the edge of your seat with excitement and expectation. And yes, the viewer is naturally on the side of the heisters!

        Berlin was a songwriter of immeasurable talent and pure genius, so I’m not surprised at how he whipped off those four unforgettable songs for “Annie.” What amazing skill and range! He puts to abject shame all those persons who say that they can’t create art without “inspiration.”

        I do agree that there are some subjects that are not quite suitable for poets whose style and preferences are uncongenial and hostile to those subjects. I couldn’t write a poem celebrating Nathan’s annual Hot Dog Eating Contest, or singing the praises of Prohibition.

  7. Cheryl A Corey

    I’ll admit that I can have a short attention span, but the opening couplet drew me in to continue reading. The charming story and rollicking rhythm kept my attention throughout. “geezer” and “cheeser” – what delightful rhymes!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Cheryl, many thanks for this kind comment. I think the most gratifying thing a poet can hear is that his poem has held a reader’s attention. The rhyme of “geezer” and “cheeser” was just a momentary flash of inspiration, especially since the repertory of rhymes for “geezer” is fairly limited (Caesar, freezer, seize her, tweezer, tease her, beezer).

      Reply
  8. Drilon Bajrami

    I greatly enjoyed the poem, Joe, the heptametre really makes the poem stand out since 90%+ of form poetry is written in iambic tetrametre or pentametre. A perfect use case in this poem, too. And I personally love catalectic lines, especially in longer poems to break up the monotony, which in long poems can get stale, I find. Nothing like a headless line when you want to emphasise something, also.

    This tale reminds me of a quest in an MMORPG (fantasy role-playing game, basically) called “One Small Favour”, where a merchant asks you for a “small” favour and you end up doing about 20 small favours to end up satisfying the merchant’s request, since everyone capable of helping you also requires a small favour, too.

    And the ending is just perfect. It turns a fun children’s tale into something with philosophical weight. Even the immortal greats who’ll keep being published for millenia, are completely insignificant on a solar scale, let alone a universal one. But then again, does that matter when everything and everyone we know and love comes from this little rock in this corner of the universe? Earth may as well be our universe.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Drilon. I enjoyed writing this poem, and I did it on a dare from my wife — who said that I couldn’t put my grandfather’s story of the Old Man and the Mouse into English verse. I swore that I could and I would.

      The closing of the poem is something of a shock, since most Americans are conditioned to think of fairy tales as always having a happy ending. But a lot of the real, original fairy tales don’t, which means that they are true to life.

      Reply
  9. Maria

    What a fascinating man your grandfather must have been. And what a fascinating story beautifully retold. It has reminded me somewhat of my grandmother who would tell us bed time stories until we fell asleep. Each night when she came to visit us I would determine that I would stay awake until the end of the story until I realised that she carried on until we were all asleep. Although I love Greek there is a musicality to Italian that makes it a joy to listen to.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Maria. My grandfather was indeed a fascinating man, but he also had a seriously bad hair-trigger temper, and could be very difficult at times.

      His native tongue was the Messinese dialect of Sicilian, but he knew standard Italian perfectly and insisted that his children be fluent in three languages: Sicilian, Italian, and English. His youngest child, my uncle Audace, grew up to speak all three of them, as well as German and French.

      Reply
  10. Mary Jane Myers

    Dear Joseph

    Bravo! Fourteeners! 43 elongated-line exact- rhymed couplets. Quite a technical feat.

    I love folk tales—I have a bookshelf-full from various countries, including Calvino’s Italian Folktales. How wonderful that you heard this tale from your grandfather, and in the tale’s original language! I can just imagine the twinkle in your grandfather’s eye!

    This tale gives an account of how things in the world are interrelated in a complex web of mutual dependence. Each time the mouse encounters a new demand, he adds to the account of the complexity of the web by first repeating its prior elements. The setting is rural, with “country” places (field/well/barn) and people (old man/mason/farmer) and animals (mouse/cow/hen)—all of whom communicate (magically?) with one another. The overall situation is one of rural scarcity and poverty: the cow needs hay, the field needs water, the well needs repair, the mason is hungry for breakfast, then hen needs grain, the farmer needs help to fix his shed.
    The premise is quite bizarre: of course, even if the old man were to return the tail to the mouse, how could it possibly be re-attached to the mouse’s body and function normally again? So the mouse is on a doomed quest from the get-go. The ending is horrific—death by burning in fiery pitch—which reminds us: peasant wisdom is often about the brutality and unfairness of life. E.g., Grimm’s Fairy Tales are grim! Peasant folk matter-of-factly tell the truth of how hard and painful life is.

    I especially like the feminine rhymes: and my three favorites are: geezer/cheeser; decaudated/hated; and udder/shudder. These three I believe are not found in any “rhyming dictionary”—I’m impressed with your wordsmithery!

    Sincerely
    Mary Jane

    Reply
  11. Cynthia L Erlandson

    What a great — though tragic — story. I really enjoyed it, particularly its rhythm, and its concise characterization of each of the characters, both animate and inanimate.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Cynthia. I did not want the poem to be this long, but as I worked on it, it became clear that the lengthy repetitions were essential to the structure and humor of the piece. I made an effort to keep them as succinct as I could.

      Reply
  12. Joseph S. Salemi

    Dear Mary Jane, thank you for these thoughtful and insightful comments. Yes, the tale is clearly coming from the context of a very poor agricultural Sicily, where want and death are daily commonplaces. As you say, “brutality and the unfairness of life” are part of peasant perceptions,. And as in all animal fables, we as readers suspend disbelief as we listen to animals and inanimate objects speak. This sort of thing is as old as Aesop, and children seem instinctively to have no trouble with it.

    The poet Hilaire Belloc wrote a good deal of poetry that was ostensibly for children, and many of the poems had gruesome endings (a child is killed by a falling statue, or eaten by a lion at the zoo, or dies in a fire, or suffers death from swallowing bits of string, or gets a permanent face disfigurement that renders her ugly for life.) Despite the sheer horror of it, the poems are hysterically funny!

    Thank you again, and I’m glad that you enjoyed the piece.

    Reply
  13. Paul A. Freeman

    What a sad ending. I was particularly impressed how you retold, in a different way each time, the various requests the mouse needed to fulfil. This was helped by the length of line slowing down the reading into a more conversational rhythm.

    Thanks for the read.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Paul. In a cumulatively repetitive piece it really is necessary to vary what is said, so as to avoid tedium. I tried to accomplish that.

      In the wonderful nursery poem “The House That Jack Built,” straight cumulative repetition is OK because the reader gets drawn into relative clause after relative clause, and the poem grows like one of those toy constructions built out of linking blocks.

      Reply
  14. Morrison Handley-Schachler

    This is a very enjoyable read, Joseph. I did not know this folktale at all until you put it into verse for us. The mouse’s continuous hopeless quests are, I suppose, a bit like the old lady who swallowed a fly but much more elaborate. Thanks for an entertaining fable with a tragic ending. I suppose we could draw the moral that once you have made a bad decision you might never be able to undo it and should sometimes know when to give up before you bring something even worse upon yourself.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Yes, that’s possible, but I hate morals in poems. along with messages and meanings. The nice thing about this animal fable is that it is nothing but a pure narrative description of a happening, without any goddamned teaching attached.

      Reply

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