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MEDUSA AND THE MOT JUSTE

Once there was a Greek divinity of the sea

named Ceto and she married a man named Phorcus,

And the marriage must have been pretty raucous;

Their remarks about which child took after which parent

must have been full of asperities,

Because they were the parents of the Gorgons, and the Graeae,

and Scylla, and the dragon that guarded the apples of the Hesperides.

Bad blood somewhere.

Today the Gorgons are our topic,

and as all schoolboys including you and me know,

They were three horrid sisters named Medusa and Euryale and Stheno,

But what most schoolboys don't know because

they never get beyond their Silas Marners and their Haiawathas,

The Gorgons were not only monsters,

they were also highly talented authors.

Medusa began it;

She wrote Forever Granite.

But soon Stheno and Euryale were writing, too,

and they addressed her in daily choruses,

Saying we are three literary sisters just like the Brontes

so instead of Gorgons why can't we be brontesauruses?

Well, Medusa may have been mythical but she wasn't mystical,

She was selfish and egoistical.

She saw wider vistas

Than simply being the sister of her sisters.

She replied, tossing away a petrified Argonaut

on whom she had chipped a molar,

You two can be what you like, but since I am the big fromage

in this family I prefer to think of myself as the Gorgon Zola.