I admire people who can write poetry

[jaunthie]

Although I'm relatively skilled in prose, and I certainly love the English language, rhyme and meter are not my metier. I suppose some of this derives from the throes of agony I endured when forced to fracture poems into the cold, dark, meaningless framework of structural analysis. But mostly I think poetry is a gift, one that I don't have much of. When I discover poetry that also happily skewers the marvellous absurdities and oddities of the English language itself, I just have to share. From The Simplified Spelling Society:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
and by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981.

You can find more gems like this on their poetry page. Or not, as it suits you.