Laurits Andersen Ring, Danish
Workers Laying the Ziti For Italy’s Marinara Pipeline, 1885
Oil on canvas
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MASTERPIECE #2862
Artist info is pointed to in my comment at a prior blog entry.
/// Skills perfected by ditch diggers now,
in the future they may disavow.
When there’s no place to hide,
dig a hole deep and wide;
each foot soldier will need to know how.
/// Years from now in a Great Worldwide War,
men will fight as they haven’t before.
Trenches deep will have spanned
fields renamed “no man’s land.”
Foes intrenched, so a “win” none can score.
/// As the men hunker down in the dirt,
former atheists quickly convert.
Crouching low, on their knees,
sick with “trench mouth” disease,
they may pray that they will not be hurt.
/// Workers digging a long drainpipe ditch
grow exhausted, but never grow rich.
So, one “faunaphile” loafer
trained a huge pale gray gopher
to help dig, (but the foreman might snitch).
/// Gopher’s head pokes up out of the soil
so the foreman, their scheme, will not spoil.
Amid sections of pipe,
(the ceramic clay type),
it will hide, then return to its toil.
/// Though the gopher was slow at his work, he
had replaced someone else, far too quirky.
They’d fired the bunny
who thought he was funny
by missing turns to Albuquerque.
/// Up ahead the ditch turns to the right,
where north-south and east-west lines unite.
The pipe section they’re seeking,
(to connect without leaking),
is an elbow, and nowhere in sight.
/// The worker in charge of supplies
isn’t really the brightest of guys.
“The line can’t extend
with no right-turning bend,
can’t we do a three lefts compromise?”