Further advice for surviving in the world of Classical Mythology, by Paul Burgess
If you’d prefer to not become a bear,
Do not let Jove remove your underwear.
[Callisto’s “crime” was having a child after being raped by Jove. For this crime, Hera turned the girl into a bear. A moral we see throughout the classics is: Do not let one of the Universe’s most powerful entities rape you…]
Further advice for surviving in the world of Classical Mythology, by Paul Burgess
If Zeus decides it’s you he’d like to woo,
In time, you might be saying only “Moo.”*
*Zeus/Jove turned his love interest Io into a cow to hide her from his wife.
“Old McDonald”
On Old McDonald’s cattle farm
There was no anti-theft alarm
Ensuring that he’d be awake
When thieves did all his cattle take.
“An Elegy for a Cow” [An Elizabethan Sonnet by Paul Burgess]
A mockingbird’s demise is sad, no doubt,
But rarely does one raise a single brow—
No, not a man it seems does cry or pout—
When flies begin to feast upon a cow.
No thought is spared the weeping widowed bull
Who never could replace the love she gave,
Who lacks the milk to keep their children full,
Who can’t afford a spade to dig her grave,
Who knows, alas, his cherished, mooing mate
With leather tanners soon will have to meet—
Because it’s destiny, says the Book of Fate,
To be some guy or gal’s reclining seat—
Whose beefy bovine tears inscribe in soil
These lines produced by bullish sweat and toil.
Miscellaneous Inanities 