I had some notes about Nantucket yesterday, and emitted a little smirk about limericks. (Boys will be boys, as Reagan said, when learning of the Israeli raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor.) A reader writes, “You’ve inspired me to share with you a limerick that I composed a couple of years ago. It features the word ‘Nantucket’ and is totally clean.” Here ’tis:
Once anchored not far off Nantucket
Was a ship that would roll like a bucket
As it projected a light,
Through prisms made bright,
’Cross a shoal, so that sailors could duck it.
Shaw, I believe, said there were two kinds of limericks: dirty and bad. It’s not necessarily true. Maybe I’ll offer a few from my repertory in a future column. (Or maybe not? There is the War on Terror to think about. Or what is our president calling it now?)