Cock a buggery doodle doo!
I’m bending to lace up this buggery shoe!
You’d be buggery bad-tempered too
If the buggery cock
Woke you buggery up
At buggery, buggery five twenty two!

*****

Annie Fisher writes: “When our grandchildren were very small, we would sometimes visit to help with child care. The children would often burst into our bedroom early in the morning yelling ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ (Probably encouraged by their parents). On one occasion my husband was staying with them for a few days without me. On the second day he sent me a text at the crack of dawn. The text read ‘Cockabuggerydoodledoo!’ and so I understood that his day had already begun! I thought ‘cockabuggerydoodledoo’ (a case of ‘expletive infixation’, Google tells me) had irresistible rhythmic force.
My poem is, of course, based on the traditional nursery rhyme:
Cock a doodle doo!
My dame has lost her shoe,
My master’s lost his fiddling stick
And knows not what to do.“

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry (this one appeared in Snakeskin) for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/

Photo: “cock-a-doodle-doo.” by alyssaBLACK. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.