If you should ask for anchovies
on pizza you should know
that though they add much zest to cheese
and flavor to the dough
once they've been pickled in a cask
where they are tightly packed
that they derive their name from Basque,
perhaps a useless fact.


According to Margalit Fox, who says that the Oxford English Dictionary will be on the Web at the end of 1999 ('The O.E.D. Adds the Web to its Lexicon: Putting the Dictionary on Line Means Taking a Modern Approach to a Century of Tradition, ' in the Circuits section of The New York Times,11/5/98) , anchovy, jai alai and jingo all have Basque roots. Jingo may come from a Basque word meaning God and was first used by magicians around 1670, according to my O.E.D. chaparral is also Basque.

On May 31,2006 Anna Russell responded to this poem thus:

Response from This Veggie

Before you ask for anchovies
there's one thing you should know
they once had mums and daddies,
their corpse is in your dough.

11/5/98

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anchovies/