No Kid—No Kidding

No kid—no kidding—comes in here to eat

Or drink: this restaurant’s a kid-free zone.

Korean grown-ups like a safe retreat

In which a scroll through menus on a phone

Does not mean it or they or someone’s kid

Needs tech support or medics’ expertise

On being scalded by hot broth amid

Kids on the loose and doing as they please …

If you’re the parent, do your duty, heed

Demographers—Korea’s rate of birth

Dropped far too low. Go home again and breed!

If you’re the kid, work hard for all you’re worth—

No shirking duty dining out, or old

Gray diners’ pension funds will fail to hold!

 

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, The Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO., the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly.