First the original and then my parody. Parodies are often funny but that isn't a rule
Also note that I copied the same random rhyming pattern.
After Apple Picking Robert Frost
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Parody of Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple Picking’
**Note that Frost’s poem has an unusual rhyming pattern, so I duplicated that pattern exactly.
My first jobs were in restaurants and I started out as a dish washer...
After Dish And Washing
My long two-handed arms submerging into suds
are scrubbing still,
but there's more dishes from the evening's meal
beside me, and each stack just buds
into a greasy, growing-lifeless tower.
And to think I thought it would take an hour
to scrub such strangeness from every plate
& now from my eyes: I'm rubbing clean
the fine cuisine I gladly ate
unknowing of the fate that waited near.
In fact had I foreknown the final scene,
the cleansing act, the price unclear,
I would have stopped to drop my steak
and let it fall
unto the floor along the wall.
Peas and all.
One less dish to wash if it should break,
but just a drop in the old mop bucket,
I'm afraid to say.
Oh how I wish to take each dish and tuck it
away beneath the hallway rug.
My inside palms will keep the pain
of a metallic man-made sponge all day
and my ears are haunted by the sound
made by the kitchen's strain
when loads & loads of dishes being washed, abound.
Oh, I have never had so much
of dish & washing: I am tired over
eating the expensive meal I couldn't cover.
There seems yet ten zillion zillion plates to touch,
to wash and put away re-stacked.
In fact
I don't quite know
how many, if any, I've made already clean
for it seems that I've labored so long
& and with nothing to show.
Oh, now I can see what I've seen
in so many bad dreams.
If the Chef wasn't here
the washer could feel free to raise his screams,
long screams, and even louder sounds of fear-
or just some human song.