A Zealot in Big Muddy

What did three quatrains and a couplet—
(Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets?)—
really mean to the seventh grade?

Miss Worley ranked them in importance
just below the Ten Commandments
She didn't use those exact words

but we saw that Sunday school gleam
in her Methodist eye

and when she stood before the class
with all the power of her ninety pounds
we could count the waves in her marcel

Notes

Larry chose this poem because in junior high school he was equally impervious to the delights of the sonnet, yet in recent years has come to write some himself. His are of Spenserian form. He had to google the last word, 'marcel', which is a hair style popular in 1920's. Larry came to Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley in 1998, left in 2006, and returned in 2023.

McDaniel, Wilma. (2001) Borrowed Coats. Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, New York.
Courtesy University of California, Merced Library. Copyright owned by the Regents of the University of California.