Open a new door – A collection of poems

The Blurb

Open a New Door is a poetic peep into the lives of the poets, Kim Blades and Robbie Cheadle, both of whom live in South Africa.

The book is divided into four categories: God bless Africa, God bless my family and friends, God bless me and God bless corporates and work. Each part is sub-divided into the good, the bad and the ugly of the two poets’ experiences, presented in rhyming verse, free-style, haiku and tanka, in each of these categories and include colourful depictions of their thoughts and emotions.

The purpose of this book of poetry is encapsulated in the following tanka and haiku poems:

What drives me to write?
To share my innermost thoughts
The answer is clear
It’s my personal attempt
To make some sense of this world.

Inspiration blossoms
Like the unfurling petals
Of the…

As I scrolled down the page I became conscious that I was doing exactly the thing I was researching. My ‘normal’ concentration and attention to words, born of my lifelong love for seeing them unfold on paper, was wandering off and bouncing around.

There has been a good deal of research and publicity on how the way we read differs from book to screen. The research covers the way we gather, assimilate, remember and understand information and the results of some studies are startling, though you would have to read them all… preferably on paper, it seems… to get the full range of detail as they look at everything from empathy to engagement, from transportation, cognition, to the ability to reconstruct events.

This particular article was well crafted, engaging and interesting; the information pertinent… and yet there I was visually skimming the paragraphs, dipping in and out to extract information…

Following yesterday’s tree-themed poem, today we share ‘The Way through the Woods’, one of the best-loved poems by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Although he is not known for writing obscure poetry (some of his short stories are true head-scratchers, mind!), Kipling leaves the meaning of ‘The Way through the Woods’ somewhat ambiguous.

‘The Way through the Woods’ by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.