This is my second attempt at macaronic verse — a poem that mixes two languages in a humorous manner. While Latin is often the second language, this macaronic limerick uses musical terms:
Macaronic Music
By Madeleine Begun Kane
If you fiddle around while I speak,
Then I’ll trumpet your lousy technique.
If you flaut me, beware!
Your bass secret will air —
Broken G string and all, horny freak!
(Poets United prompts us to writing something about sound.)
First off, this limerick (despite its name) has nothing to do with macaroni. I’m not suffering from Passover pasta-withdrawal. Nor do my dreams (or nightmares) ever feature anything of a noodle nature.
So why the title? I just learned, from the delightfully informative Miss Rumphius, about the rare and usually comic form called macaronic verse. What the heck is macaronic verse? We’re told that it’s a usually absurd and nonsensical “poem in a mixture of two languages, one of them preferably Latin,” and that “the poet usually subjects one language to the grammatical laws of another to make people laugh.”
So naturally I had to try it, mixing legal terms (mostly Latin) in with standard limerick English:
Macaronic Limerick
By Madeleine Begun Kane
The corpus is AWOL. Oh my!
I attest that I left it hereby.
What a bona fide mess.
My mentis has stress.
It’s de facto I mortemed that fly.
(Linked at We Write Poems pairings prompt.)
Mad Kane (Madeleine Begun Kane) is a writer, musician, and "recovering lawyer." She won the Robert Benchley Society Award For Humor and enjoys writing limericks, song parodies, and current events haiku.
You can email her at madkane@madkane.com, visit her political humor blog, or stop by her home page.
