Had I the money, I would withdraw
From the world’s incessant roar
And wait in my gated home
For civilisation to be as Rome.
But no,
Perhaps we can avoid a collapse
And the roar
Will go
On as before.
Civilisation
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Tag Archives: history
Legacy
Some things
Have wings
Of light,
While others fly at night
Their poison carrying down the years,
Provoking bitter tears.
One such has gone
But his legacy lives on
In those who can not wait
To employ their knuckles tattooed with “Hate”.
An intelligent man
Frequently can
Do more harm
Than a stupid one,
For he is possessed of charm
And learning to.
True he has gone
But the bitterness lives on.
The word “fascist” is ugly to me
And I can not agree
With those who would label him so,
Yet I know
That it is possible to stoke
The fire and deplore the thuggish smoke
On which we all choke.
This is not quite fair
As there where
Racists ere
He spoke.
Yet he threw a match
Which did catch
Provoking flame
Blame
And smoke.
Conspiracies
Conspiracy theory
Most dreary.
“Little green men are getting into my head”
He said.
“The Russians didn’t poison those people in Salisbury you know …”.
On and on they go
The crackpots who have heard or read
Something crazy and, of course it is true!
“The Jew
Is controlling the world and the holocaust is a lie”.
I wonder why people deny
History’s weight
And give way to hate.
The holocaust did take place
But weirdos and extremists after fantasies chase
While fake “historians” grin
And coin it in.
“Little green men” are harmless
While holocaust deniers are charmless
(But by no means harmless)!
Putin must be laughing up his sleeve
At the gullible idiots who believe
That Britain released a nerve agent on it’s own street.
So I greet
Each conspiracy theory
Most dreary
With a contemptuous smile
While
I bite my tongue lest my disdain
Is made plain in words.
Of Statues And Poems
On 23 November 2016, I wrote my poem “Rhodes”, https://newauthoronline.com/2016/11/23/rhodes/. The poem was inspired by the controversy surrounding the campaign by the Rhodes Must Fall organisation to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College Oxford.
I spent much of yesterday evening (26 March), recording and uploading a number of my poems to Youtube, including the “Rhodes” poem. I was assisted in this task by a friend who voiced disagreement with the views expressed in the “Rhodes” poem. Our discussion was friendly but our views on the issue of “Rhodes” where diametrically opposed, with my friend being a passionat advocate for the removal of the Rhodes statue while my opinion remains as expressed in the above poem.
This article on Cecil Rhodes in Standpoint Magazine makes for interesting reading and does, broadly speaking, accord with my view of this complex and interesting character, (http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6388/full).
K Morris reading his poem ‘Rhodes’
Me reading my poem ‘Rhodes’.
“Upon His Picture”, by Thomas Randolph
When age hath made me what I am not now,
And every wrinkle tells me where the plow
Of time hath furrowed; when an ice shall flow
Through every vein, and all my head wear snow;
When death displays his coldness in my cheek,
And I myself in my own picture seek,
Not finding what I am, but what I was,
In doubt which to believe, this, or my glass:
Yet though I alter, this remains the same
As it was drawn, retains the primitive frame
And first complexion; here will still be seen
Blood on the cheek and down upon the chin;
Here the smooth brow will stay, the lively eye,
The ruddy lip, and hair of youthful dye.
Behold what frailty we in man may see,
Whose shadow is less given to change than he.
“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all”
I am a great lover of quotations. I recently came across the below quotation by Arthur Balfour, which struck a chord with me:
“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all”.
In his work “The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill”, the late Lord Robert Blake writes of Balfour in the following terms:
“The new Prime Minister was a person of immense charm, great intellectual power, and much political sagacity. Like his uncle, he took it for granted that parliamentary democracy would only work—if it could work at all—as long as “the masses” continued to elect their leaders from “the classes”. Not that he was himself, any more than Salisbury, a typical member of the order to which he belonged. He was too clever, too cool and too detached to be thus categorised …”.
(“The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill”, by Lord Robert Blake. Eyre and Spottiswoode (publishers) LTD. Chapter 5, Tory Democracy and the rule of Lord Salisbury 1881-1902).
For anyone interested in finding out more about the enigmatic Balfour, the following article may be of interest, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour.
I can not capture this sense of dissociation
I can not capture this sense of dissociation
Reflected in campfires
Of shop windows that blaze.
Walking home
I remember Rome
And see wolves waiting
For the camp’s lights to go out
Slavery Museum
Walking around the Museum of Slavery, in Liverpool
I come face-to-face with the cruel
Past
Where ships crossed the ocean vast
With their human cargo.
Many a negro
Slave
Paid for beautiful properties to be built
By Liverpool merchants who gave
Generously to charity
To set themselves free
From guilt.
Its true
That slavery isn’t new.
It was practiced in Greek and Roman time,
Yet the crime
Of the transatlantic slave trade
Has made
More of a mark
Perhaps because those of lighter skin
Committed the sin
Of taking those of dark
Complexion
From their native land,
Which was a rejection
Of the truth that beneath the skin
We are one in nature
(Or god the creator),
Depending on your view
Of what is true.
Our love died long ago
And I know
Not what Happened to you.
But I remember walking through
That place
Just Two lovers of different race …
(http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/).
(https://lovelycurses.com/2018/02/01/black-poetry-writing-month-traveling-through-time-slavery/).
Past And Present
It is a truism that we can not live in the past
But when the present seems barren as plastic
It is tempting to believe that we can stretch the elastic
Of this fact
And act
In denial
Of the vast supermarket aisle,
Where meaning’s lack
Is concretized in musak.
K Morris - Poet 