Bless

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blessed are the wrongdoers, for they are our teachers -
the proud, the triumphant, the forceful, the unrighteous,
the cruel, the impure, the warmongers, the persecutors.

They harm, they vilify, they hate, they oppress, they kill,
so who would be like them in thought? Not us, the blessed.

Beware, lest your praised deeds are turned to greater ill.

Earth, Water, Air, Fire

 

 

 

 

 

Another wriggling form to struggle with for days
and fanny up an epic theme in thirty lines,
my life! So life it is, Creation through to graves,

for what that’s worth: we’ve end times and withered vines
ahead. Who trod the grapes of wrath’ll have few to squash,
their gelt-grab land-snatch flung to dust, while covert whines

from suited overlords and sharks under the tosh
and lies will dribble on throughout each ghosted land,
lost whispers in a wind that whips the world. Gosh,

Isaiah had the right of it! So has the prophet band
scrying fire across crisp woods, but blanked, ignored,
until the burned earth is deemed out-of-hand.

Out-of...? Only when the ghouls up top were floored
by hail as big as their balls and hammered heads were split
did they admit that ‘something’ needed ‘doing,’ then stored

up more muck in watered words that wobbled on, unfit
to stem tsunamic seas drowning half of humanity
on frantic shores; the last half’ll fall to the Pit

via scorch and blast and choke. We’ll suffer more inanity
before all’s done and all are sifted fine as silt
across the martyred world; it’s much too late for sanity. 

We’ll be left to weep and fail at the globe’s tilt,
its magnet lurching as its crust upheaves to drop
where most life’s out, where ruins carry our death-guilt.

We were warned. Our Jeremiahs called out, “Stop!”
for fifty years, “Block the greed; you mow what you sow.”
Unheeding, civilisation’s due to bottom its top.

No pretty form will temper Creation’s end; the blow
will leave us gone, no life here to cry out, “Woe!"

Creativity or criticism?

 
Two of my friends were recently  bewailing the fact that they'd come to poetry writing late in their academic careers. One of the questions that came up was about a creative/critical divide and I wondered how much of associative v. logical thinking is wired into us, innate or nutured. I can only give an example from my own life.

I think I was born with (and probably inherited from my dad) a naturally associative mind, which was why I loved poetry and stories, music and art so much as a child - I was writing 'poetry,' stories and making music when I was under 10. When I got to 'A' levels (and I hated the embryonic Eng. lit.crit./lit. theory part of those - I wanted to do it, not read about it) I realized I hadn't got much of a logical mind, needed in the real world, which was why I turned consciously to political and sociological theory. I then ended up teaching those, killing much of an arts-based creative life in the process for the next 20-odd years - the only one I really kept up in private and for myself was poetry writing, all others being diverted into home-making.

Then, in my late 30s/early 40s, depressed and sickened by the realities of educational and national politics, I reverted to my earlier interests, retrained in an entirely different field and left academic life. I've never regretted the shift back to the arts, nor have I regretted forcing myself through an academic, critical/logical life; both are of value now, but it was a tough way to learn - through experience.

I found out in later life that I have five major creative areas/drives/talents; towards the practice of the arts, towards politics/political theory, towards service to people, towards teaching and towards practicality. The trick has been to learn how to keep them in balance and not cut off a limb, as it were. I'm certainly much happier and more content now than I was in my early life.

Most people manage to balance the creative/critical impulses, I'd imagine, or settle for one or the other without regrets. It does bring up the issue of 'deep structures' in the mind/brain, though, much as I dislike pure structuralist theory. But questions remain about why we have them, if we do. Are they natural carriers for talents? Why do we have talents? How far back in childhood are they triggered? Are we born with a propensity for them to emerge, or are they already there - nature and nurture?

My own feeling now is that we are born with an urge to creativity and curiosity, however they display themselves in later life.

Nonsense 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stumie lon I wakled kwin
the laft atwoop stend lupped wi’ starn,
but allys I bakuckled swin
the plunk it pockled in the farn.

Kwae wrid I dounkle in the plunk
kwin tot es brarn n’ shuft biyheft?
I blam the plinks n’ plock the frunk,
ni muir ta wakle frin ootheft.

A translation - of sorts:

The summer long I walked when
the sky above stood full of sun,
but always I made backtracks if
the rain it puddled in the morn.

Why would I paddle in the rain
when all is warm and safe indoors?
I slam the windows, poke the fire,
no more to walk far out of doors.