Read it and Laugh

On today’s edition of On My (Library) Bookshelf, we have these special guests:

Marianne Moore, Complete Poems:

"O to Be a Dragon"

If I, like Solomon,…
could have my wish—
my wish…O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Andy Adams, Why the Chisolm Trail Forks, and Other Tales of the Cattle Country

Ogden Nash (selected poems), I Wouldn’t Have Missed It (from which, Oh, how to choose a sample?):

From "The Slipshod Scholar Gets Around to Greece"

I sing of the ancient Greeks.
They had magnificent physiques.
[…]
If the Greeks had never existed who would have been the most annoyed?
Freud.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost
Wendell Berry, Farming: a Hand Book (I decided if Dr. M. was going to write about’m, I wanted to read’m):

From "A Letter"

Now back in Kentucky, far from you again,
I often think of those days and nights, and long
for their music and their mirth. And then
I remind myself: the past is gone. Remember it.

Wodehouse
And my (favorite) find of this time:
Odgen Nash (trans. James Gleeson and Brian Meyer), Ave Ogden! Nash in Latin (original in comments. The meter is not the same as Nash, or Vergil, for that matter, but it’s still fun):

"Hipppotamus"
Ecce hippopotamus, sis!
Ridemus quomodo videatur nobis,
Tempore tamen miserabili
Miror quomodo videamur ei.
Pacem, pacem, hippopotame!
Videmur grati nobis vere,
Es dulcis sine dubio
Aliorum hipporum oculo.