When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.
[Flannery O’Connor]

The vulture eats between his meals
And that’s the reason why
He very, very rarely feels
As well as you and I.

His eye is dull, his head is bald
His neck is growing thinner.
Oh! What a lesson to us all
To only eat at dinner!

[speaking of homeliness–a poem by Hillaire Belloc, to which I was introduced when my brother, then eight, recited it at a talent show]