Michael Ceraolo- A Poem

Modern Olympian Ode #5 (1904):  Anthropology Days

Both the 1900 games in Paris

and the above ones in St. Louis

were small sideshows at their respective World's Fairs

rather than being main events,

and such obscurity almost doomed the Olympic movement

And it would have merited doom too,

for the sideshow within a sideshow

that went by the name Anthropology Days

Though there is only one race,

the human race,

divided up into thousands of ethnicities,

ethnicity in this case

being defined by language,

other ways of classifying ethnicity

have been a mania for many

(such classifications mistakenly called races),

and there have been few if any

sorrier attempts at such insanity

than the one that took place here

Pygmies

Mexican Indians

Syrians

Turks

Filipinos

Patagonians

Ainu

and numerous other groups,

none of them trained athletes,

were picked to participate

in the first and worst 'Special Olympics',

designed to empirically demonstrate

'white' athletic superiority

But,

in an instance of poetic justice,

the anthropologist,

who deserves eternal anonymity,

didn't feel he had gathered sufficient 'data'

to draw any conclusions from his study

Thou Shalt Not Commit a Pseudo-Science