Public service announcement

Since St. Patrick's Day is coming up on Monday we've spent some time in class learning about the holiday, researching the country of Ireland, and writing limericks. For the uninformed, limericks are simple five line poems in which the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme, while the third and fourth lines follow a different rhyming pattern. For example,

There once was a girl named Mary
Who wanted to be a fairy.
So she tried a spell
That didn't go well
And now her hands are hairy.

It was actually harder for them than we thought. Most students put their name somewhere in the poem but then soon discovered that it was difficult to rhyme with their names. They all seemed to start out the same way.

There once was a boy named Noah
who had a friend named Foah.

Some of the boys tried to take it to a crude level with disastrous results. One started out his limerick like this.

Austin left a mess in the toilet.
He cleaned it out with a quoilet.

A good deal of time was spent telling them that they couldn't make up crazy words just to make it rhyme. After numerous rough drafts they all hammered out their completed limericks. As I was reading through them later in the day, one of them definitely stood out. It read somewhat like one of those public service announcements where the cast of, say, Lipstick Jungle informs you of the risks of eating partially cooked chicken. When they're done the NBC peacock flies away on a rainbow, confident that Brooke Shields has hit the message home. Read the poem below and see if you can decipher Rick's ailment. Somewhere the producers of Rent are all atwitter with ideas for a sequel.