Below the wave—far, far below—
There is a place where sponges grow;
Where corals sit and contemplate
The awful mysteries of fate;

Where, pickled in eternal brine,
The sea-cucumbers mope and pine,
Imagining a better life
Above the ocean’s daily strife;

Where sea-anemones despair
And curse the tangled hair they wear;
Where hermit crabs, dejected, roam
From shell to shell in search of home.

Not so, not so the gentle sponge.
Misfortune never makes him plunge
Into depression, nor does pain
Make much impression on his brain:

His brain in youth was very small,
But now he has no brain at all.
The key to bliss would seem to be
Inflexible stupidity.

We humans bear a brainy curse,
But we could do a whole lot worse
Than imitate this mindless sage
Who eats his brain when he comes of age.

By Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle.

Hark!
In the dark,
In the park,
A most misguided lark
Will bark.

Now, mark
How the lark
Long past midnight will bark—
The lalalalalalalark
In the park
In the stark
Dreary dark.

If you ask, Why a lark?
Why a bark in the dark in the park?
No idea. Not a spark.
But the lark
Still will bark
In the dark.
Therefore, hark.

By Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle.

The pounding of my eardrum in the morning
As if a ten-year-old percussionist
With dreams of playing for the Rolling Stones
Were living in my ear and practicing
And hoping against hope that he would be
Discovered in his aural practice room
By agents from a record company
That went extinct in 1969
Suggests that next time someone says, “Drink up!
You only go round once!” I ought to say,
“I plan to go round several thousand times,
Metempsychosis willing, and I think
I should consider what my future lives
Will think of me, and in particular
The future life I plan to live tomorrow.”

Ladies and gentlemen, um, and I guess
The rest of you… Looks like I’ve made a mess
Already. What I really mean to say
Is, Here we are, on this auspicious day—
I think the day’s auspicious. That’s the word,
I think. Well, anyway, you may have heard
That on this day in 1928
Our local chapter held its first—no, wait,
I think I mean in 1927.
4 minus 5, and carry the 11,
and—no, I think I had it right before.
Subtraction always makes my eyeballs sore.
At any rate, on this auspicious day,
We’re here. That’s what I really meant to say.
And so, auspiciously, we gather here,
For sacred duty, and because there’s beer,
And celebrate our chapter. —Well, that’s bad.
I’ve lost the special poem I thought I had.
I wrote it just for— well, of all the— Folks,
Does anybody here know any jokes?
Looks like my speech is done. —Thanks for the cheers.
They really are like music to my ears.

I sing of arms, and of a man
For whom the gods contrived a plan,
A man whose name, I think, was Stan;
And Stan had a terrific tan.
At breakfast time, he ate his bran,
And Venus was his biggest fan.
Muse, tell me how the strife began!
What caused the gods his plans to can?
Why did they send him halfway to Japan?
Sometimes it’s hard to make these stupid lines scan.

(The rest of the manuscript is filled with doodles of horses.)

When Mark Twain discovered Julia A. Moore, he knew he had found a pearl without price. The many admirers of William McGonagall will testify that their lives are incomparably richer for the poetry he has left us.

What then shall we say of Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby? When we have said that she is worthy to mingle in such exalted company, we have perhaps paid her the highest compliment we could pay to any poet.

Yet Byllesby is entirely unknown to the twenty-first century. Her one slim volume of poems—poems that ought to be as immortal as “The Tay Bridge Disaster” or “Temperance Reform Clubs”—has been stuffed in the back stacks of libraries and forgotten.

Well, that is about to change. Dr. Boli intends to do for Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby what Mark Twain and Bill Nye did for Julia A. Moore. Poets, after all, often must wait till many years after they have died to see any appreciation—a fact of which Mrs. Byllesby herself was all too well aware.

Why is it that the public will never realize
That a person is ever really great, ’til after he dies?
Then they will start and sing his praise,
And always with flowers they will strew his grave.

The one volume Mrs. Byllesby published during her lifetime was a collection of Patriotic Poems provoked by the First World War. Dr. Boli knew he had found a treasure with the first two lines of “Our Soldier Boys,” the first poem in the book:

Of our soldier boys we are mighty proud,
And in our praises for them we are always loud.

The poems only get better from there. Here is her tribute to “The Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.,” and if it does not make tears roll down your cheeks, you are made of stern stuff and are qualified for a job with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.

In this war both the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A.
Are doing their part to help win the victory.
When you see an ambulance with a red cross on the side,
You may be sure they are doing good far and wide.

To the Y. M. C. A. the boys go, their letters home to write,
Their evenings are spent there nearly every night.
They are always waiting and receive them with joy,
For the Y. M. C. A. is the home of the soldier boy.

The cross is on the nurse’s arm, and the doctor’s over the heart,
Both of them are soldiers, doing a hero’s part.
Caring for the sick and wounded certainly is an art,
But you’ll find the Red Cross has been there from the start.

The Y. M. C. A. will keep them from many a strife,
While at the Red Cross they are always saving life,
For we know the home of the soldier boys, while they are away,
Is either the Red Cross or the Y. M. C. A.

— Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby.

(Each one of the poems in the book is signed that way, though no other poets are represented in the collection.)

After this introduction, you are doubtless panting for more of Rebecca Maxwell Byllesby. Run to the Internet Archive and open her book of Patriotic Poems. By the time you close it 28 pages later (it is not a large book), you will be changed.