HOT. 08 Jan 1933. Once upon a time a hot day would only cause the news to stoop so low as to publish bad poetry.
HOT. (1933, January 8). Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954), p. 6 (First Section). Retrieved January 19, 2020, from https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/58672040?searchTerm=hot%20summers%20and%20cold%20winters&searchLimits=#
HOT.
“Hot, very hot!” says the man in the street to you,
“Warm, very warm,” your neighbor remarks;
“Quite a summery day,” is the general greet to you.
Voiced in the streets and the parks.
“Ninety-nine in the shade,” said the pink perspirationer,
Selling you sausages, singlets and sox,
Ditto the constable and his probationer
Pacing the sweltering blocks.
But whether we lump it or whether
we’re liking it.
Whether we fly to the pekoe or Pot,
Whether we’re riding or whether we’re
hiking it,
We are all striking it,
Hot!
Heat to the front of us, heat all behind us,
Heat where we labor and heat where we love;
Heat to embarrass us, heat to remind us
Sheol’s below and above.
Heat in the East when the red sun is rising,
Heat in the west when it’s golden and red;
And a damoiselle’s duds are scant and surprising
Fabric and filament fled.
And whether it’s temperature rising or risen,
Whether it climbs to the century spot;
On beach or in bungalow, park or in prison,
Whispers grow weazen
It’s Hot!”
Sultry the sigh of the easterly breeze to-day.
Stifling the evening when skeeters are near.
Nature’s all groggy and gone-at-the knees away,
Life’s in the sallow and sere.
Squash shops and fruit shops, their clients cajoling
In from the sweltering streets for a spell,
The succulent ice round the trachea rolling.
Brought by a buxom young belle.
Summer-time signs are the lad and his Lula
In habiliments thin as a film story plot;
A cave couple loving from far Whack-a-doola,
Where the shade’s cooler
Than Hot!
Hot was the Christmas and Hot the New Year of it.
Hot may be Easter and later on, too,
Full-blooded fat men go frantic for fear of it.
Everything wrong and askew.
Did someone say. “Lows are approaching at last,”
Down where Curlewis keeps cold-storage ice?
Did you notice upon his Observatory mast
The wet weather signal device?
But till autumn comes with it’s gradual graying,
And winter gives ice-men a very bad trot;
And the cold hand of frost the land-scape is spraying.
Will people be saying
“It’s Hot!”
-DRYBLOWER.