Flashing

I guess she supposed she was dashing,
The woman whose ring kept on flashing.
     Instead she looked crass
     Without any class
And merited more than a lashing!

(Not a diamond - battery-operated!)

The Belmont

Sat at a bar with an English bloke,
The race set to begin.
He had no clue about the stakes
Or who was primed to win.

My husband filled him in about
The Triple Crown and such;
He was intrigued although he didn't
Really know too much.

The race began; our glasses raised,
We watched the horses run,
The winner clear right from the time
The sprint had first begun.

"A Triple Crown!" we shouted
As the winner crossed the line. 
We had no money on the race;
The outcome still was fine.

For people love a winner
And this horse* sure fit the bill. 
He'd won the Derby, Preakness, but
He hadn't had his fill.

Today, he put an end to that
And we all raised a glass
To Number 5, a special breed
With speed and grace and class.

Our British friend was cheering, too,
Quite glad he got to see
A bit of what will be set down
In racing history.

*American Pharoah

Fallingwater

Fallingwater is a house
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
And tours are given of its rooms
To bring one great delight.

The home is cantilevered
So the owners'd have a view
Of a lovely waterfall, a vista
Visited by few.

Every door and every window
Can be opened all around
So the residents or visitors
Could relish every sound.

All the terraces and woodwork,
Every fireplace and lamp
Is so obvious a Wright work,
Just as if he'd left a stamp.

After touring and observing
Such a setting so divine,
I can only state the obvious -
I wish that place were mine!

Heinz 57

Henry Heinz made ketchup
(First called catsup) long ago,
Plus a host of other products - 
Some you'd be surprised to know.

On a train in New York City,
Henry saw an ad for shoes;
There were 21 styles mentioned,
Quite a catchy lure to use.

Since he sold a lot of products,
(Over 60, so they say)
He picked 57, which is what
Their label says today.

He just liked the way it sounded -
In the brain that number sticks -
So it's been that way forever,
(Or since 1896.)

That's the second fact I learned
At the museum* about Heinz,
But the first one really threw me
As a writer of some lines.

On the early cans and bottles,
When he started in the biz,
Heinz included an apostrophe - 
The catsup was Heinz's.

Doesn't Heinz sound so much better?
Sometimes advertising moves
Borrow some poetic license
So their product name improves!

*Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh

Trucks

If you don't like to drive
On the road with a truck,
Then on certain roads,
You'll be out of luck.

If the road is the plate
And the trucks are the bread,
You may start to feel
Like the sandwich spread.

But no matter the speed
That you like to go,
When you're stuck with a truck
You will both go slow.

Still the rules of the road
Mean that while you drive,
You defer to the trucks
So you'll stay alive!

In Gettysburg

In Gettysburg, the soldiers fell
In shock, in pain, in death,
As thousands from the North and South
Cried out with their last breath.

Their bodies lay in bloody fields,
A vista grim and stark;
Today, those hills have been restored
Into a hallowed park.

With monuments and obelisks 
Commemorating all
Who fought and died when barely grown,
Sucked in to wartime's thrall.

A marker made of stone records
The bodies there interred,
Remembered with a name or else
"Unknown," a lonely word. 

The numbers laid out state by state
Count lives the war's undone.
New York sustained the greatest loss -
Eight hundred sixty-one.

That just reflects the ones who died
Those three days in July
And after all these years, no one
Can really answer why.

The battlefields are there to see -
To visit and to tour
But sadly, war is a disease
For which there is no cure.

Road Trip

An actuary does the math
And figures out the time
Each person gets to live his life
Before he leaves his prime.

Of course, an average doesn’t mean
That everyone’s the same,
So some of us will stay alive
Beyond statistic’s claim.

Yet knowing what I know, as years
Accumulate and pass,
The time to travel’s NOW before
Death bites me in the ass.

And so I pack my bags, a road trip
Waiting ‘round the bend,
Some sights to see we haven’t seen
Is what we do intend.

The actuary’s formula
May hold a lot of truth,
But even I can do the math
When I subtract my youth!