Checkers

Sing to me most famous bard
Warble your cleft notes
Canticles chillingly chanted
Echoing now from vacated pews
Your audience gone to play cards

Fling me villain down a wishing well
Cut by the first stone
Depressed and drowned
In ink thicker than bone
They don’t encourage games in hell

King me, king me you great buffoon
Weave your diagonal fiction
White and warped
Between disregarded pawns
Black rooks stand silent as tombs

Mocked and teased by castigating crows
I buried treasure beneath a winter moon

Cheated too often by gregarious crows
You abandoned chess too soon
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Credits: Word and Image Fragments artistically (I hope) composed and pasted digitally together by Me (Jay Larsen).
Oldest know chess piece by the Romans.
Paper crow target by Airhog.
Ramito the Jibaro courtesy of Flor "Ramito" Morales Ramos, "El Cantor de la Montaña", RIP.
The word "Bard" Origin: 1400–50; late ME < Celt; cf. Ir, ScotGael bard, Welsh bardd, Breton barz < IE *gwrs-do-s singer, akin to Albanian grisha (I) invited (to a wedding).
Other words sources are unknown to me at this time.
Internet courtesy of Al Gore.
Your span of attention supplied by human intelligence and other PBS viewers like you.
Thank you.