Limericks from Summer Vacation

Summer vacation is typically a time to turn away from formal studies and head towards places like Disneyland or the beach. For my kids, it’s a time to sleep in late, then loaf around the house and tell me they’re bored. This makes it hard to concentrate on writing my next book. But I manage to fill in the chronological crevices with occasional limericks.

We spent the first week of our summer break milling around the South of France. I thought it would be fun to compose a series of limericks about France, but things did not go according to plan. Instead, I ended up with one dubious limerick about Van Gogh, a series of spicy limericks about Spain, and a random assortment of verses related to things like nuclear fission and the Egyptian afterlife.

Limericks about the classroom

For starters, here’s a couple limericks about teachers and classrooms. The first one is about my dad. He taught business writing classes in Orange County back in the 80s and 90s, and he’d always bring some interesting (seemingly unrelated) props and conversation pieces to class with him. The second one recalls the glory days of quadratic equations and puzzling polynomials.

      I once had a father who knew how to teach
      Describing the baseball he held in his reach
              The atoms, if counted
              Correctly amounted
      To more than the units of sand on the beach

      The math teacher mister Maloney
      Can see when solutions are phony
              He’ll gladly refute
              The erroneous root
      As he frowns on this form of baloney

Limericks from vacation

There’s nothing like a faraway vacation to help us step outside our daily routine and see the world a little differently. The exotic sights, sounds and smells have a way of triggering all sorts of unexpected ideas. So here’s what I was thinking about as we toured through Arles, France, the famous stomping grounds of Van Gogh and Nostradamus.

      There’s a painter who came from the Low Lands
      Whose sunflowers fill tell-and-show stands
              His ear got the hatchet
              But nothing can match it
      The opus produced by Van Gogh hands

      There’s a village in France that they call Salon
      The home of a star-struck phenomenon
                  And old Nostradamus
                  Wrote verses to warn us
      But never foresaw Mr. Q-anon

      Measuring stars on the Memphis meridian
      Under Anubis unearthing obsidian
              Pyramid structures
              Where reasoning ruptures
      The afterlife swiftly supplants the quotidian

 

      On the Indian sea near Djibouti
      The sailors grow lonesome and moody
              And night after night
              They imagine the sight
      Of a baby beluga’s big booty

      There’s an atom that can’t be repaired
      When the nuclear energy’s shared
              But beware of the boost
              From the power produced
      It’s the mass times the speed of light squared

      My friend from the seventh dimension
      Arrived with a recent invention
              He’s foreign and stateless
              And loves feeling weightless
      His body is held in suspension

Further Reading

If you enjoyed these family-friendly, light-hearted limericks, please consider purchasing one of my books or subscribing to the blog. You might also want to check out some of these popular articles:

• Limericks and Synchronicity
• Limericks and Poetry about Mental Health
• Limericks about Art History
• Limericks about Ancient Egypt