Cod Poem by gershon hepner

Good Catholics used to eat the dish
on Fridays and when they thought that God
said Fridays they must all eat fish,
the fish they chose to eat was cod.
Men ate the head and tongue, each cheek,
and bladder, with the roe and milt,
and gave their children every week
cod liver oil that's good for guilt.
Leftovers they would use to make
the ground more fertile, while a bag
called codpiece hung from every rake
to hide the fact his thing would sag.
All inner organs of this beast
delighted Dublin’s Leopold,
cod’s roe perhaps his favorite feast,
in Ulysses that's what we're told,
but in the ocean cod, like Bloom,
have sadly turned to ghosts because
men’s appetite has left no room
for live ones. Let us therefore pause
and think about the predators
who wipe out what they love to cook,
and pray that God won’t edit us,
sans codpiece, from his cookery book.

Re-reading this two thousand five
I find it now extremely odd
that I believed God couldn’t swive,
not needing any piece for cod;
I’ve changed my mind, and like a demon
have written, in prosaic manner,
of how long time ago his semen
provided Israelites their manna.