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Have you ever planned a garden
Hoed it through with minute care
Not a weed or grass root pardon
Track each gopher to his lair?
Trace him to a fresh turned dirt pile
Where you had a stalk of corn
Or a budding bed of myrtle
Standing on the mound, forlorn?
Then begins the merry hunting
As with hose and water (wet)
You drowned out half the neighborhood
And here’s the thanks you get.
No recompense for labor,
When he won’t be caught he won’t
Because, you see, with gophers
Now you have him, now you don’t!

— Sgt. Grady L. McMurtry
[undated, circa World War II]

Originally published in Thelema Lodge Calendar, June 1991