The POTW: Verse Til It Hurts

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POTW #846
(Week of 21 July, 2013)
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The fun-science news blogs are all ablaze this month with the final success, after sixty-nine years, of a pitch drop experiment. The idea is simple: Tar pitch is a substance that looks like it's solid, but is actually a liquid that just flows very, very slowly. You can demonstrate this by sticking a hunk of it into a funnel and waiting for a drip to fall out of the bottom. Now, the pitch in question has dripped before, about once every ten years in fact, but nobody had ever actually seen it happen until this month, when, like so many other aspects of our modern lives, it was caught on a webcam. You can see the speeded-up video on the internet; it just looks like a gloppy thing dripping, except that there's a clock whizzing around in the background to let you know how much time is passing, which makes it kind of mind-boggling. Anyway:

Drip

Somewhere in a closet there's a funnel full of pitch
Seven decades waiting just to verify it drips
Patience and technology have finally seen it done
Much to the amazement and relief of everyone
The having done is so much more appealing than the doing
For most of us the magic is the beer and not the brewing
I'm stuck for how to end this verse so here I blankly sit
Poetry is often like a funnel full of pitch

Copyright © 2013 by Dave Grossman

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