Walking Across Italy

Some people ask me what do you think about while walking everyday? Last year I thought about olive trees and wrote a song about them. This year, the unseasonably hot weather had me dreaming of ice cubes, so I wrote a little poem while walking.

Ode to an Ice Cube

As the sun beats down on my head from the top,

And the heat from the pavement just won’t seem to stop,

I dream of a frosty, crystalline mass,

That klinks and tinkles when it falls in a glass.

Whether cube or cylinder, crushed, or sphere,

It has the power to lower the temperature near.

Making Coke more refreshing, and tea more iced,

It’s a marvelously simple chilling device.

But what I don’t understand, with all of that might

Why Europeans are so consistently stingy and tight.

They hand you a soft drink, or some other stuff.

And tell you emphatically “it’s cold enough”!

Or they give you a glass with one lonely scrap.

And expect that it fills your parched thirsty gap.

But you smile and take luke-warm liquid away

And dream of your freezer where there’s ice by the tray.