A Darkly Delightful 1905 Poem Celebrating Punctuation
The peaceful land of Punctuation
is filled with tension overnight
When the stops and commas of the nation
call the semicolons “parasites”
Within the hour they form their troops,
an anti-semicolon group
The question marks avoid the scrape
(as always) and quietly escape
The semicolons’ mournful racket
is drowned out by surrounding brackets
And then the captured creature freezes
Imprisoned by parentheses
The dreaded minus sign arrives
and — slash! — ends the captives’ lives
The question marks, now homeward-bound,
pity the corpses on the ground
But, woe! A new war looms large,
as dashes against commas charge
And cut across the commas’ necks
so that the beheaded wrecks
(the dashes delight in gore)
as semicolons hit the floor
Both semicolon types they bury
in silence in the cemetery
Those dashes that still remain,
Creep blackly behind the mourning train
The exclamation holds a sermon
with colon’s help, right on the spot
Then through their comma-form free nation
They all march home: dash, dot, dash, dot…
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