Day 705, Christmas Day

(This can be sung to O Holy Night)

 

It’s Christmas time and Donald feels rejected.

He tweets, he’s stuck in the White House alone.

Frightened, unsafe, the border unprotected,

The Democrats will not pick up the phone.

 

They will not pay five billion measly dollars

So Donald had to turn off every light.

They do not care how plaintively he hollers.

He sits all alone, in the dark, this Holy Night,

 

Where lights, so bright, once shined all through the night.

 

Government is closed, shut down on Donald’s orders.

The caravans of brown folks all want in.

It’s Christmas time but we must close our borders

And tell them all, “There’s no room in the inn.”

 

They’re poor and brown and all of them are frightened;

They’re young and old and even babes in arms.

With such a threat, our borders must be tightened

With concrete and fences, tear gas, and force of arms.

 

Our lights, once bright, indifferent to their plight.

 

(Coda:) Feliz Navidad, buenos noches, and good night.

 

And, because Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, according to the Julian calendar in use in England then, here’s a tribute to his birthday.  It can be sung to Greensleeves.

 

Gravity  (Tune: Greensleeves)

 

One summer day while Newton lay in Lincolnshire on vacation

An apple fell and rang his bell and Isaac began contemplation.

He said, “It was gravity that made the apple fall on me.”

“I had a thought I could use that came to me while I was snoozing.”

 

He calculated, integrated, then exclaimed, “Aha! That’s it!”

“The same force guides the flow of tides and holds the moon in its orbit.”

He said, “It is gravity that ties the motion of moon and sea.”

“All masses attract in space and gravity does the embracing.”

 

Then Einstein thought on what God wrought and space and time’s geometry.

Could stars and gas or other mass distort space in their vicinity?

He said, “I think gravity results from spatial deformity.”

“Thus, objects in motion swerve toward dimples where spacetime is curving.”

 

So where are we with gravity and modern formulations?

Shall how mass acts as it attracts forever frustrate new equations?

We wonder if gravity will crunch the cosmos finally.

Meanwhile, here on Earth its drag, means some day your boobs will start sagging.

 

Stephen Baird, 2000.  Revised 2016