Where have all the Berties gone?
The lilies that toil not, nor do they spin,
They’ve all arisen with the dawn,
To get their three miles running in.
Then holed up all day, in offices or banks,
Won’t join you in a leisurely brunch,
No afternoon tennis or games or pranks,
Coping with month’s end accounting crunch.
Even dinner is a rushed affair,
No time for idle chat or chit,
March through the rose garden’s scented air,
To meet the quota of the Fitbit.
One sighs for the Berties of yester-year,
Mentally negligible, but always at hand.
One found their naïveté rather dear,
And could have molded them into something grand!
(The above mentioned composition has been whipped up by Lisa Dianne Brouwer who describes herself thus:
“Lisa cut her milk teeth on P.G. Wodehouse. Literally, in fact, as many of her father, Professor W. Brouwer’s orange and white Penguins are frayed and eroded at the edges. In later years this destructive child was wont to dip them in the bath water.
However, a lifetime of absorbing Plum’s gently humorous philosophy of life had given her father a mild and forgiving disposition, always excepting when his daughter escaped out the window of a summer evening….
These days father and daughter continue to share books, conversations over coffee and dabble into writing, occasionally diving sideways into rhyme.”
Here is wishing more power to her pen!)
ashokbhatia 