A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty
BY Ogden Nash

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty,
to Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me,
then-- How old is Spring, Miranda?

Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry"

Mirror--Sylvia Plath

Mirror-Sylvia Path

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author.

Kurt Vonnegut's Short Story Rules

Here are Kurt Vonnegut's excellent rules for short story writing:

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007; ) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973).He was known for his humanist beliefs as well as being honorary president of the American Humanist Association

Here are Kurt Vonnegut's excellent rules for short story writing:

• Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.


• Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.


• Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.


• Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.*


• Start as close to the end as possible.


• Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.


• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.


• Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.