From time to time I write ballads, which are poems that are song-like and folkish in nature; well-written ones can be sung at a pub over a few beers, much like a sea shanty or the lines sung by Pippin and Merry in The Lord of the Rings. The one in this post had me laughing so hard I was crying hot tears, not only because its content is so funny – after all, who has never laughed about noxious body gas? – but also because it actually happened … to ‘a friend of mine’, of course!

As mentioned before, this poem is a ballad; they typically adhere to a rhyming scheme of iambic tetrameter (8 beats per line) followed by iambic hexameter (6 beats per line).  In Winds of Sauerkraut, only the alternating lines of hexameter rhyme with one another, with each stanza running four lines long.  I hope you laugh your head off too as you read it!

 

Winds of Sauerkraut

 

One day in Maffra I once ate

A dinner decked with lamb;

Beside the meat was sauerkraut:

With that my mouth was crammed.

 

Its juicy goodness tingled rich

My tongue and down my throat;

Fermented cabbage, braised with love,

Did make my belly gloat.

 

I could not swallow quite enough

Of all that German kraut;

It took its time to work is way

And pack some mighty clout.

 

For 3 short hours it swilled around

My tubes and inner pipes.

I went to bed a happy man

Beside my blessèd wife.

 

But then a gurgling noise commenced

And queasy pains gave birth

As my intestines filled with gas

And outwards spread my girth.

 

The pressure cooker finally popped;

I hissed a ghoulish wind.

The bedsheets flapped like billowed sails:

A cyclone did begin.

 

It took its time to permeate

Our poky little room

But once it spread, that noxious reek,

The place ponged like a tomb.

 

My little woman jumped the bed;

She wretched!  She coughed!  She gagged!

The windows kept their lips tight shut!

The horror – how it dragged!

 

No sooner had one gale torn threw

Before another struck;

My daughters begged me, “End it now!”

Inside that oven Dutch.

 

A cavalcade of unseen rot

Assailed each precious nose!

I laughed so hard my body ached

And thought I might explode!

 

Oh, how I tried to make it stop

But that just made it worse!

With patience we endured the trial

For all that it was worth.

 

How much I loved that home-made brew!

My mind was lost for words.

It seemed as though each face was filled

With death, decay, and turds

 

Though soon enough it all died down.

We had to change the sheets

Although the room would come to smell

Like fart and sweat and feet.

 

© All rights reserved.  Nahum H. Sennitt 2025.