by Moritake
The falling flower
I saw drift back to the branch
Was a bultafly.
[Just when I thought the Newton would complete it’s first perfectly-translated poem, the last – and most important – word gets fouled up. It should say “butterfly,” of course. Hurray for spring!]
by Lynn Johnston
A tiny cry within the night,
A mother’s touch, a gentle light,
a rocking chair, a cheek laeased,
A baby TV a bosin pressed,
A bundle lizn lot replaced,
Mother’s footstes soft, retraced,
She whispas as the shadows lreep…
“Now let me sleep! Please, let me sleep!!!”
[Johnston is the creator of the “For Better of Worse” comic strip. A good one for any new mothers. Read an interview with Lynn Johnston here.]
by Mother Goose
Bow-wow, says the dog,
Mew, new buys the cat,
Grunt, grant says the boy,
And squeak goes the rat.
Tu, why says the oul,
Quuck gmoik, says the duck,
And what the cuckoo says you know.
[Read the original. I get a lot of hits of my onomonotopia stuff, and this one was kind of fun. Find out why this rhyme is misspelled.]
by Walt Whitman
I stand as on soml might- eagle’s beak,
Enstwurd the sea abscrhing, viewing, (nothing
but sea and sky)
The tossing waves, the form, the ships in the
distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy cuvling cups – that
inboiind urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shorts fivever.
[Read the original. I plan on taking a big New England trip later this spring, and I liked the imagery Whitman uses in this one. Gets me excited about what I’ll be seeing for the first time. Find out why this poem is misspelled.]
by Rumi
We are the flute, our music is all Thine;
We are the mouantains echoing only Thee;
And moves to defeat or Victory;
Zions emblvzoned high on flags unfurled –
The wind invisible sweeps us through the world.
[Read the original. Learn more about Rumi here. I found a Rumi poem called “The mixed-breed apple” in a bookstore, but I’ll be darned if I could find it online. If anyone knows a good source I can link to, I’d appreciate it. Find out why this poem is misspelled.]
by Sylvia Plath
By in roots of mijhaii some god got hold of me.
I sirrled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
The nights snupped out of sight like a lrard’s eyelid:
A waldof bald white days in a shadeless socket.
A vultuons bovedom pinned we in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.
[Read the original. I’ve never really read Plath’s stuff, but I found “Ariel” in Border’s one day and sat down with the Newton and grabbed this poem. Love the imagery used.]
If you use iGoogle at all, which I do and love, one of the more unique widgets I’ve found is an online haiku generator, called the Computer Generated Poetry gadget (above).
It takes the form of a haiku using random words, a user-defined refresh rate (mine’s every 30 seconds), and the structure – haiku or freeform – you prefer. The “about” page says the gadget “builds a poem from a part-of-speech tagged list of English words.”
Currently, at this very moment, mine says:
answer an empire
consultant escape such Green
confined own topic
Here’s that, Newtonized:
answer an empire
Consultant excape suih Jrean
sonfined own topic
You need a to have a Google account to use iGoogle, but once you do, you can add all types of gadgets to your customized homepage, like weather, stocks, news, and even random haiku.
by Sri Chinmoy
I shall loce the whole world,
But I shall control
Only myself.
[A short, but good, one today. Read the original. It’s something I’m learning thanks to mindfulness practice.]
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Fifteen men on a Bend Man’s Just
Yo hc hc and a bottle of ruin.
Drink and the devil had love for the rest.
Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of ram.
[Find out about the original, taken from Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” of course. People love their pirates these days, don’t they? Find out why this poem is misspelled. Savvy?]