I read poetry for pleasure – otherwise, why read it? But I find all the time that poetry also is relevant in defining or highlighting what is going on around us every day. Consider poems I have lately read and found they express a sentiment appropriate to what I am reading in the headlines.
– One of the most obscene and hateful features of everyday life is the abuse, sometimes murderous, which men inflict on women. A development to be praised and widely supported is the establishment on what seems a secure basis of Help and Shelter arrangements for otherwise helpless abused women. They now have an option of behaving towards their disgusting and brutal mates or partners like the wife of the man in the little poem I recently discovered by LAG Strong.
The Brewer’s Man
Have I a wife? Bedam I have!
But we was badly mated.
I hit her a great clout one night,
And now we’re separated.
And mornin’s, going to me work
I meets her on the quay:
‘Good mornin’ to ye ma’am!’ says I:
‘To hell with ye!’ says she.
– Any number of times I have read of some atrocity here (the merciless slaughter of the Kaieteur News people) or in the wider world (in Russia the Beslan school massacre by Chechyna terrorists – “It is not given to many – the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses”) and said to myself or exclaimed in horror: “No, this is the worst. This freezes the blood forever!” And then I read Aleksander Wat’s poem and see that it will not have an end, mankind will always be capable of worse.
From Persian Parables
By great, swift waters
on a stony bank
a human skull lay shouting:
Allah la ilah.
And in that shout such horror
and such supplication
so great was its despair
that I asked the helmsman:
What is there left to cry for? Why it is still afraid?
What divine judgement could strike it again?
Suddenly a rising wave
took hold of the skull
and tossing it about
smashed it against the bank.
Nothing is ever over
-the helmsman’s voice was hollow-
and there is no bottom to evil.
– Or I read about the latest bombing in whatever country, in whatever “good” cause, and read Brendan Kennelly’s poem written in the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Nails
The black van exploded
Fifty yards from the hotel entrance.
Two men, one black-haired, the other red,
Had parked it there as though for a few moments
While they walked around the corner
Not noticing, it seemed, the children
In single file behind their perky leader,
And certainly not seeing the van
Explode into the children’s bodies.
Nails, nine inches long, lodged
In chest, ankle, thigh, buttock, shoulder, face.
The quickly-gathered crowd was outraged and shocked.
Some children were whole, others bits and pieces.
These blasted crucifixions are commonplace.
– As I get older, and the older I get the faster I seem to get older, I find myself regretting all the wonders and miraculous developments I read about and feel that I will miss as time goes on beyond my passing. Every day brings a series of reports on new things in the world, some prospect promising extraordinary, fresh insights into how the universe works and how man will master all he surveys. I find myself yearning to be there when it all happens. And then I read the Portuguese poet Affonso Romano DeSant’ Anna’s poem and get things into a rather different perspective. We, I realise, are always there right now.
Letter to the Dead
Friends, nothing has changed
in essence.
Wages don’t cover expenses,
wars persist without end.
and there are new and terrible viruses,
beyond the advances of medicine.
From time to time, a neighbor
falls dead over questions of love.
There are interesting films, it is true,
and, as always, voluptuous women
seducing us with their mouths and legs,
but in matters of love
we haven’t invented a single position that’s new.
Some astronauts stay in space
six months or more, testing
equipment and solitude.
In each Olympics new records are predicted
and in the countries social advances and setbacks.
But not a single bird has changed its song
with the times.
We put on the same Greek tragedies,
reread “Don Quixote”, and spring
arrives on time each year.
Some habits, rivers, and forests are lost.
Nobody sits in front of his house anymore
or takes in the breezes of afternoon,
but we have amazing computers
that keep us from thinking.
On the disappearance of the dinosaurs
and the formation of galaxies
we have no new knowledge.
Clothes come and go with the fashions.
Strong governments fall, others rise,
countries are divided,
and the ants and the bees continue
faithful to their work.
Nothing has changed in essence.
We sing congratulations at parties,
argue football on street corners.
die in senseless disasters,
and from time to time
one of us looks at the star-filled sky
with the same amazement we had
when we looked at caves.
And each generation, full of itself,
continues to think
that it lives at the summit of history.
