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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

Disasters, Delights and Other Detours - 83. November Now

A pair of Rubayats for the first day of classes in November.

Allusion

 

My students often think me rude

when I to poetry allude

while in the course of math to teach

of intersections, real or skewed.

 

Perhaps it is beyond their reach

a line of Frost or Yeats to breach;

still less of Shakespeare do they know

besides what counts as common speech.

 

They wonder what such words bestow

on sines’ and cosines’ onward flow,

their amplitude and frequency,

which vexed equations try to show.

 

Perhaps a verse might help them see

some axiom with piquancy

remembered to decrepitude

as if ‘twere learned with recency.

 

 

 

Transition

 

Today we had a practice snow

to interrupt the status quo

of autumn’s chilly, grey decline

advancing into Scorpio.

 

Each year the planets must align

to end the harvest so benign

preparing earth for winter’s chill,

in white the trees to redesign.

 

So frost is training field and hill,

the stream that wends about the mill,

for so it must obey the stars

a solstice lesson to instill.

 

Above the cloud, soon setting Mars

presides o’er sleetish seminars,

preparing winds that howl and blow

for journeys from the land of tsars.


May your November be brighter than the snow that greeted me this morning. Reflect, rant or rave here - it's fine by me.
Copyright © 2017 Parker Owens; All Rights Reserved.
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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Parker Owens
4 minutes ago, Valkyrie said:

I think I would have enjoyed math a lot more if my teachers had infused poetry into the lessons.  I woke to a dusting of snow yesterday.  November has announced the end of fall with conviction, that's for sure.  

Poetry is one way to remember things; one wonders how the Bard learned his arithmetic at all. The snow that arrived has now vanished, but I know it will be back. Thanks for reading these, and for your thoughts. 

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Pedro1954

Wonderful, as ever.

I really like the interlocked Rubayat form, something you introduced me to some time ago. Thanks again.

After some initial hiccups, I was pretty good at maths at least until I was stymied by 3-d calculus at Uni. Having said that I’m sure my classmates and I would have learnt more with some lateral tuition similar to yours. With this in mind your poem deserves a reply in kind covering topics ranging from basic algebra, via Laplace transforms to Fermat's Last Theorem. Alas the best I can manage is a rather simple, down-market offering:

His students, the tutor’d perplex

Teaching maths in verse, by heck!

But they’re all sure

It’s no longer a bore

To solve those equations for  X.

 

Edited by Pedro1954
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Parker Owens
4 hours ago, Pedro1954 said:

Wonderful, as ever.

I really like the interlocked Rubayat form, something you introduced me to some time ago. Thanks again.

After some initial hiccups, I was pretty good at maths at least until I was stymied by 3-d calculus at Uni. Having said that I’m sure my classmates and I would have learnt more with some lateral tuition similar to yours. With this in mind your poem deserves a reply in kind covering topics ranging from basic algebra, via Laplace transforms to Fermat's Last Theorem. Alas the best I can manage is a rather simple, down-market offering:

His students, the tutor’d perplex

Teaching maths in verse, by heck!

But they’re all sure

It’s no longer a bore

To solve those equations for  X.

 

No downmarket poem was this - I enjoyed your limerick very much. I seem to remember an old chestnut (not of my composing) from years back:

Roses are red, violets are blue, rhyming is hard, and so are Laplace transforms...

Thank you very, very much for your reaction to these poems. I'm grateful you read them. And here is a bonus one for you:

Equations of higher degree

Get solved with a je ne sais quee,

Though it’s fraught with derision

Use synthetic division,

And the roots will surely come free.

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