POETRY

 

“What Do We Do with a Variation?”

What do we do with a difference?
Do we stand and discuss its oddity
or do we ignore it?
Do we shut our eyes to it
or poke it with a stick?
Do we clobber it to death?
Do we move around it in rage
and enlist the rage of others?
Do we will it to go away?
Do we look at it in awe
or purely in wonderment?
Do we work for it to disappear?
Do we pass it stealthily
Or change route away from it?
Do we will it to become like ourselves?
What do we do with a difference?
Do we communicate to it,
let application acknowledge it
for barriers to fall down?

James Berry from When I Dance, Harcourt Brace

from Race and Membership:Facing History, Facing Ourselves

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Rousseau

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 

Robert Frost

Image: Rousseau, Carnival Evening. I love this image where the figures seems so dwarfed by the hugeness of the wintry forest. No leaves, all still and somewhat deathly. Nothing gold can stay, all must change- time, nature and  people.

ICARUS

Only the feathers floating around the hat

Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred

Than the usual drowning. 
The police preferred to ignore

The confusing aspects of the case,

And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.

So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply

“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus

Had swum away, coming at last to the city

Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,

Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit

Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings

Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once

Compelled the sun. And had he told them

They would have answered with a shocked,

uncomprehending stare.

No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;

Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:

What was he doing aging in a suburb?

Can the genius of the hero fall

To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound

And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,

Constructs small wings and tries to fly

To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:

Fails every time and hates himself for trying.

He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,

And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;

But now rides commuter trains,

Serves on various committees,

And wishes he had drowned.

Edward Field 

Image: The Icarus Fish, Brian Despain

  PENELOPE

In the pathway of the sun,

In the footsteps of the breeze,

Where the world and sky are one,

He shall ride the silver seas,

He shall cut the glittering wave.

I shall sit at home, and rock;

Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;

Brew my tea, and snip my thread;

Bleach the linen for my bed.

They will call him brave.

Dorothy Parker 

Image John Waterhouse,( Pre-Raphaelite painter) painting of Penelope and her suitors

Sept. 30 MONSTERS

And all the little monsters said in a chorus:

You must kiss us.

What! You who are evil,

Ugly and uncivil.

You who are cruel,

Afraid and needy,

Uncouth and seedy.

Yes moody and greedy.

Yes you must bless us.

But the evil you do,

The endless ado.

Why bless you?

You are composed of such shameful stuff.

Because, said the monsters, beginning to laugh,

Because, they said, cheering up.

you might as well. You are part of us.

Suniti Namjoshi

Reference:
Namjoshi,S., Warner,M. 1994, 'Six Myths of our Time: Managing Monsters':The Reith Lectures,1994, Vintage, London