Dysprosium : The Poetic Table of the Elements at everypoet.com

Elements

Actinium
Aluminum
Americium
Antimony
Argon
Arsenic
Astatine
Barium
Berkelium
Beryllium
Bismuth
Boron
Bromine
Cadmium
Calcium
Californium
Carbon
Cerium
Cesium
Chlorine
Chromium
Cobalt
Copper
Curium
Dysprosium
Einsteinium
Erbium
Europium
Fermium
Fluorine
Francium
Gadolinium
Gallium
Germanium
Gold
Hafnium
Hahnium
Hassium
Helium
Holmium
Hydrogen
Indium
Iodine
Iridium
Iron
Krypton
Lanthanum
Lawrencium
Lead
Lithium
Lutetium
Magnesium
Manganese
Meitnerium
Mendelevium
Mercury
Molybdenum
Neilsborium
Neodymium
Neon
Neptunium
Nickel
Niobium
Nitrogen
Nobelium
Osmium
Oxygen
Palladium
Phosphorus
Platinum
Plutonium
Polonium
Potassium
Praseodymium
Promethium
Protactinium
Radium
Radon
Rhenium
Rhodium
Rubidium
Ruthenium
Rutherfordium
Samarium
Scandium
Seaborgium
Selenium
Silicon
Silver
Sodium
Strontium
Sulfur
Tantalum
Technetium
Tellurium
Terbium
Thalium
Thorium
Thulium
Tin
Titanium
Tungsten
Uranium
Vanadium
Xenon
Ytterbium
Yttrium
Zinc
Zirconium

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Dysprosium

Dysprosium

And here, my friend, is where we mend
The prose of those who tried too hard
The jargon of technologists
Religions and psychologists
Encrusted like a coral on these bare long-sunken bones.
Whyever weren't they satisfied to leave the words alone?
In quest for specificity and shades to match the mind
They only left all grace and fair proportion far behind.
Distorted and contorted to a parody of thought,
Disdained by scientists who think ambiguous means taut-
Ological absurdities, but here we take them in,
And through our twelve-step program they may finally begin
To lose Latinate hypocrisies and qualifying noises
Legalese, and doubletalk, and finally find their voices.
We are very proud of all the graduates we send
To the Collegia Minimus, from there they set the trend
That governs language limited in parlors without end.

And yet, I must confess, sometimes, at night when I can't sleep --
Awash in milk that's sultry, ongapatchka with counted sheep,
I wonder if we've done them any favors after all
Or only made a man too short, who used to be too tall.
I miss the lush adverbiage that overran this trail;
I miss the slower pace, I even miss the hard travail.
I'm tired of shortened sentences, and even shorter plots.
I'm sick of endings where you can't tell if he dies or not.
It's very well to strip away the babble from the core
But if you summed up Hamlet, I'd say its been done before.
Still we do serve a function, it's unglamorous, but true
Wherever would the country be, in want of what we do,
But drowning in a sea of unintelligible prose
In laws and news and manuals the tidal wave yet grows.
So next time that you visit the gymnasium, solarium,
Or wear cubic zirconium to sprinkle eggs with sodium,
Say thanks for that most elemental -ium of the lot
The humble old dysprosium, whose number I've forgot.

By Meredith Schwartz

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