Wed hecticosity

I know, a horrible neologism, but it fits the day (more correct would be to say "hectic Wednesday"). One kid home sick, first day of achievement testing. The wife kills the morning in a meeting with her boss, reasonably productive, shoots home to check on the kid, then gets shanghaied by a senile client for three hours calming an anxiety attack and the office can't find a caregiver to replace her. Then me, at work: a long list of new tasks, which I'm glad to get; a printer driver problem made it nine hours at the salt mines. I learned I won't be paid for overtime, though I can take comp time as necessary. The extra money would have been be nice, but I'll need the occasional hours off to deal with the addition. At least I won't have to struggle to look busy. Maybe Friday I'll take time to go photograph that mushroom-laden log. Poetry. If you've been reading this blog a while, you might remember that Greek and Latin poetry based their meter on how long a syllable lasted. A long A literally lasted a few hundredths of a second longer than a short A, but otherwise the sound was the same. I don't know Latin, but in Greek, the length of some vowels could vary, depending, for instance, on its neighbors. (Some didn't vary. Omega, literally "big O" was always long.) Add the various types of feet and how they could be mixed (Like the song "America" in West Side Story) and it all gets pretty interesting--okay, complicated. Same thing. You already know that English poetry has meter based on stress. Volume. Well, modern English does. Really olde english did it differently. It didn't matter how many syllables you had as long as you had two pair of stressed syllables per line, typically with a pause in the middle. The first three stressed syllables had to be alliterated. Note that's syllables, not words, so you could do the alliteration in the middle of a word as long as you stressed it. My teacher calls it something like bang bang bang pow. This style is new to me—I'll have to go try my hand at it. If any of you care to submit anything, we'll all be able to read your work in the comments. You can even do it anonomyously. I'll do a line, with apologies to Beowulf: The foamy-necked floater, my flyer chased a dragon My singing sword, going into its skin made it bleed. grim, but correct. Your turn.