May a Smile Be Your Umbrella
May a smile be your umbrella
And the wind blow you away.
May a purple hippopotamus
Carry off your car today.
May lightning strike your house
For what you’ve said and done.
May you drown in your own tears,
With nowhere left to run.
May the pot of gold you find
At the end of that big rainbow
Be mac and cheese instead
In a broth of toxic Draino.
May you lose your lottery ticket
With the winning number on it.
May you see a four-leaf clover
Falling off the Cliffs of Dover.
May the horse you bet upon
Stumble at the starting gun.
May your exes get together,
Causing you more stormy weather.
May the IRS discover
Money you hid under cover.
May these wishes come to you
Once our divorce is through.
And hopefully once you suffer
You’ll turn a new leaf over
And pretty soon you’ll find
Being “happy’s” a state of mind.
LTC Roy E. Peterson, US Army Military Intelligence and Russian Foreign Area Officer (Retired) has published more than 7,300 poems in 102 of his 125 books. He has been an Army Attaché in Moscow, Commander of INF Portal Monitoring in Votkinsk, first US Foreign Commercial Officer in Vladivostok, Russia and Regional Manager in the Russian Far East for IBM. He holds a BA, Hardin-Simmons University (Political Science); MA, University of Arizona (Political Science); MA, University of Southern California (Int. Relations) and MBA University of Phoenix. He taught at the University of Arizona, Western New Mexico University, University of Maryland, Travel University and the University of Phoenix.
Turning things upside down, Roy? The smile/umbrella image sets a theme, but the purple hippopotamus turns the tone to huge humor. Exes getting together approaches the poetic situation, finally revealed in the next-to-last “our divorce” stanza–as the speaker identifies himself. The divorce is the only thing that’s “ours” in this second-person poem addressing “you” in the subjunctive mood, with a host of curses inflicting enough imaginary suffering to change the addressee’s state of mind and hopefully relieve that of the speaker. But the power of the word in cursing may backfire, and you the poet undoubtedly know that, as you complete your picture of the misfortunate man in a well-finished, generally applicable way.
I love the thought about a smile/umbrella image. Once I used the phrase, “purple hippopotamus,” I thought of Ogden Nash and his “purple cow.” Somehow that image infused my writing of the rest of the poem. You caught the final “best wishes” once the epithets were finished. Thank you for your kind appraisal.
“The Purple Cow” is the work of California writer Gelett Burgess–and it’s so famous no one remembers other beautiful formal work by him. I’ll see if I can find some to send you. But I can remember what he later published about having written “The Purple Cow”:
Ah, yes, I wrote “The Purple Cow.”
I’m sorry now I wrote it,
But I can tell you anyhow,
I’ll kill you if you quote it.
You are right about Gelett Burgess writing the original purple cow poem; however, I remember the Ogden Nash version which is a spoof of the original:
Ah yes, I wrote “The Purple Cow”
I’m Sorry now I wrote it
But I can tell you Anyhow
I’ll Kill you if you Quote it!
(Note: Nash wrote this playful spoof pretending he penned the original, which added to the mix-up).
I’ve seen Burgess’s original Lark magazine, so I think he wrote it. And looking up Nash’s “purple cow,” it seems this variation is what he wrote:
I’ve never seen an abominable snowman;
I’m hoping not to see one;
I’m also hoping, if I do,
That it will be a wee one.
You are correct, Margaret. My first reference was flat wrong. I went back for more checking. Burgess did write both. I will not use that reference again. I wondered why the first line was written the way it was when I first read it in my source. Thank you for setting the record straight. I decided to add to the confusion:
I NEVER WROTE ‘THE PURPLE COW”
By Roy E. Peterson (September 23, 2026)
I never wrote “The Purple Cow”
And never hope to see one.
Burgess wrote about the cow
When all is said and done.
Some believed that Ogden Nash
Wrote of that cow he saw,
But Gelett Burgess was the one
Who wrote that poem in awe.
Браво! Надеюсь, она вдоволь настрадалась!
Mercy, Iryna! I detect some personal animosity. For the others on SCP who do not speak Russian or Ukrainian, my translation is Bravo! I hope it is long suffering.
Hey Roy — this is a kick-ass poem! No hearts-and-flowers piety, thank God. You go after your enemy the way Roman sorcerers did when writing tablets of defixion (curse tablets) against a hated party. Reading them today will make your hair curl when seeing the elaborate horrors and calamities that they wish upon their targets.
I can’t say what “you the poet undoubtedly know,” nor can anyone else. Nor can we know whether this “misfortunate man” is in fact a woman. This poem might be in the voice of a husband talking to his bitch of a wife.
Joseph, I almost feel as though I am sitting at the feet of a Roman master poet as a student with your great sharing of knowledge in your enlightening comments. Curse tablets with biting sarcasm must have been really something to behold. Thank you for your appreciation of this poem. I do worry sometimes about what I am sharing, but then I am sometimes surprised by the positive reception. I may send more such poems in the future. Goodness knows I have a lot of them.
Mercy, Roy! Clearly, the target is going to need it. 🙂 In any case, this poem requires more than a cursory reading, and it feels like a sophisticated riddle. Although I’m not at all certain, I’ll give it a try.
Distance and closeness, sabotage and repair, curses and…more curses, disappointment and anger struggle in a kind of hopeless hope of imparting wisdom and maybe even restoration, through suffering and discovery that happiness is just a fleeting emotion, and not a permanent condition, although happiness is perhaps easier to maintain for some people, by a gifted ability simply to choose it.
Thanks for a great and challenging…and dangerous read, Roy!
Jan, your perceptions are spot on! The message is to put anger aside.
May you continue to write poetry like this Roy. Very enjoyable.
Thank you, Norma. I remember your sense of humor well.
May it all happen as you suggest, Roy. I am particularly taken by the happenings in Dover – my home town is 7 miles down the road from Dover, and my grandmother was born there. So I’ve been there many times – but you know what? I’ve never seen “a four-leaf clover
Falling off the Cliffs” Ha ha – one day maybe! Thanks for all these lovely possibilities.
James, I wrote a response to you yesterday, but something happened to it. I was hoping someone like knew about the Cliffs of Dover. No four-leaf clovers? Oh, well. I wrote a poem some time ago about old people playing hopscotch on a cliff. I particularly enjoyed your tongue-in-cheek comment about “these lovely possibilities.”
James, I wrote a response to you yesterday, but something happened to it. I was hoping someone like you knew about the Cliffs of Dover. No four-leaf clovers? Oh, well. I wrote a poem some time ago about old people playing hopscotch on a cliff. I particularly enjoyed your tongue-in-cheek comment about “these lovely possibilities.”
Roy, I visited the White Cliffs of Dover once during a trip to the U.K. They are quite beautiful — and what is interesting is that those cliffs were once the major source of hard flint to be made into the flint strikers to be used on British flintlock muskets. Large lumps of pure flint are embedded in the white chalk strata.
One thing that I never forget — walking along the shoreline at the beach of Dover. There isn’t fine sand, but simply rocks and pebbles that have been worn smooth by the constant movement of the tides. And among those rocks and pebbles, if you have a sharp eye, you can find pieces of broken glass that have also been polished to smoothness. This glass is from bottles (of various colors) that have been smashed at the seaside. People in Dover told me that this multicolored stuff is called “sea glass,” and is sometimes collected to be placed in flower pots or fish tanks for decoration. When wet, the sea glass has a beautiful hazy gleam to it.
Thank you so much, Joseph, for telling me and us about the Cliffs of Dover with major flint deposits and sea glass on the beaches. I have only seen them while flying on to Europe from Heathrow.
I like it, Roy. In an odd way, I’m reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’, telling us to concentrate on the finer things in life, like…happiness.
Thanks for the entertaining read.
Paul, thank you for liking it. I can understand your Wordsworth thought, since, in a sense, the poet was blowing off steam and then returning to his more considerate mind.
Paul, thank you for liking it. I can understand your Wordsworth thought, since, in a sense, I was blowing off steam and then returning to his more considerate mind.
Like swallowing poison and thinking it will hurt your enemy; so colorfully put!
Thank you, Gerard!