I Have Fallen in Love With Dorothy Parker

Here's a lady, never flaccid,
Who wrote five words and scrubbed out seven
Whose pen was ofttimes dipped in acid,
But whose verse was penned in heaven!

At her worst, like Oscar Wilde,
At her best, there with Millay,
No cummings she, lower case beguiled,
But her own, with much to say.

Here's searing verse well paced, well written,
A story as simple as daylight and time,
Oh, my heart! I'm lost, I'm smitten
With Dorothy—a diamond in rhyme!

© Phil Hodgkins, 5/25/2002

Dorothy At The Algonquin

Always hidden, never whole
Poor used up princess, giant soul.

© Phil Hodgkins, 5/26/2002

Prayer for a New Mother

The things she knew, let her forget again-
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.

Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing,
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.

Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.

Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.

by Dorothy Parker, from "Death and Taxes," 1931

Copyright © The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and the Estate of Dorothy Parker. All rights reserved

Guestbook