Limericks about life, death, and human nature. These are attempts to use a comic form to say serious things—testing whether the limerick’s constraints can carry weight as well as wit.
When your body’s decayed to mere bone
You’ll still live and you’ll reap what you’ve sown,
And the place where you’ll dwell
Isn’t heaven or hell
But the hearts of the people you’ve known.
As the world that’s inside of her dies
Comes a song she can still recognize,
And she raises her head
From the pillow on the bed
With the look of lost life in her eyes.
An asylum’s a place where you flee
When you are not safe and not free,
Where people will care
And invite you to share,
And we all seek asylum, don’t we?
Little ships sailed the Channel before
To rescue folk shattered by war.
“But those were our men!”
So tell me again,
When does Charity answer, “No more!”
I felt that my hopes had been strangled,
And the path of my life quite mis-angled;
Then I saw a friend twist
Through the gaps that I’d missed
And took heart since our lives were entangled.
As I helplessly watched myself bleed
My own countrymen passed with no heed,
But a foreigner there
Stopped and gave me his care
And he was my neighbour indeed.
When your heart’s full of holes like a sieve
And the seams of your mind start to give,
Take paper and write
Of the pain and the fright;
Tell a story that’ll help you to live.
And, for fun, a limerick in Greek (αστείο πεντάστιχο)
Ένας γέρος από την Κρήτη,
Είχε μια κόκκινη μήτη
Όταν έξω περνούσε
Ο κόσμος γελούσε
Γι αυτό πάντα έμενε σπίτι
