Saturday 1 April 2017

National Poetry Month

Apology

Power is an obsession in the Fourth Estate.
What does it mean anyway in terms of your life?
In how we talk to each other?

What will it save you from?
The military, government, knowledge, love?
Each decade tells us what we think we need
is out of date.

Are we prisoners laying bricks for new prisons
trapped by words with limited definitions?
Shall we throw up our hands and say
that’s life isn’t it?

Even if we agree the problem is not our nature
but the way language keeps us from feeling and so
we declare war.

Against what? Hegemony?

Seems no matter what we choose
the rules of engagement have found a way
to win forever and we could endure oppression if it was fair ...

The word will not leave us or set us free.

We are thin sticks holding the ocean’s waves
in our small hands and our large conceit.
Strike out at anything, small or large,
and we strike against our willingness to surrender
to the infinite power we can’t control.

But what if I dared invent new words
like ‘thought-birds’ and ‘quest-frack’
and my multiple selves took care of the ‘I’ in the common ‘we’.

Eventually the hyphen might disappear and I might say:
compassion, empathy, analysis, or nurture 
and return the power to my heart.

Am I ready for such a radical departure?

(from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

For more information on National Poetry Month click here

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