Each game of chess
Means there’s one less
Variation
Left to be played.
Each day got through
Means one or two
Less mistakes
Remain to be made.

Not much is known
Of early days of chess beyond a fairly vague report
That fifteen-hundred years ago two princes fought, though brothers, for a hindu throne.
Their mother cried, for no really likes their offspring fighting to the death.
She begged them stop the slaughter with her every breath
But sure enough one brother died.

Sad beyond belief, she told her winning son,
“You have caused such grief; I can’t forgive this evil thing you’ve done.”
He tried to explain how things had really been
But he tried in vain; no words of his could mollify the queen.

And so he asked the wisest men he knew the way to lessen her distress.
They told him he’d be pretty certain to impress by using model soldiers on a checkered board to show it was his brother’s fault—they thus invented chess.

Chess displayed no inertia,
Soon spread to Persia, then the West.
Next, the Arabs refined it,
Thus redesigned, it progressed.

Still farther yet, and when Constantinope fell in 1453
One would have noticed every other refugee included in his bags a set.
Once in the hands and in the minds of leading figures of the Renaissance,
The spirit and the speed of chess made swift advance through all of Europe’s vital lands

Where, we must record, the game was further changed
Right across the board, the western touch upon the pieces ranged.
King and queen, and rook and bishop, knight and pawn
All took on the look we know to day; the modern game was born.

And in the end, we see a game that started by mistake in Hindustan,
And boosted in the main by what is now Iran becomes the simplest and most complicated pleasure yet devised for just the kind of mind who would appreciate this well-researched and fascinating yarn.