Trouble Came to the Turnip
My older daughter has a copy of Midnight Feasts, a poetry anthology curated by A.F. Harrold. We gave a copy to one of her friends for their birthday, too. I didn't only buy it because it contains This Is Just to Say but it may have been a factor.
One of the poems that has stuck with me is Trouble Came to the Turnip by Caroline Bird. It begins:
When trouble came to the village
I put my love in the cabbage-cart
and we rode, wrapped in cabbage
to the capital.
Each stanza has the same form, with trouble coming to the place they fled to in the previous stanza, and the narrator and their love escaping in increasingly abstract or absurdist fashions. For example:
When trouble came to the nunnery,
I put my love inside a prayer book
and we repented, wrapped in prayer
to the prison.
Honestly, it's a bit abstract for a three-year-old! But it makes this thirty-four-year-old want to build an homage using some word embedding toolkit to generate new parameters. Will I have time during NaNoGenMo 2020?