Alexa plays
As my clock chimes
Reminding me of slower days.
When Father Time
Kept a steady pace.
Many have vanished without trace.
This rhyme
Will not save
Me from the grave
And if people should find
My poetry
It will not profit me.
Yet I must write
For the night
Will end all my poetry
“A Century of Nature Stories”, left on a ledge
In a bare room.
Did perfume
Once linger here?
A spinster lived and died
In this place
We made our home
For a little while.
“A Century of Nature Stories”,
What did that mean to you?
An old tome
Left in your former home?
I recall horses on the wall
Of my bedroom.
I think you would have approved
But I will never know
For you died long ago.
I regret we never met.
The memory of that book has stuck with me
And I would like to ask you
What it meant to you.
You came from a different age.
I imagine you would have engaged
With books
And the garden with the Crab Apple Tree.
What would you have thought of this age
Obsessed with technology, where quiet
Is so often replaced by formless riot, of people
Who have lost
What they can not regain,
And I can not explain.
You where anchored in your home and time.
I have a rhyme
Of a lady I never knew
And thoughts of what may be true.
Or at least half true.
Amidst these windswept trees
I feel free
Of modernity.
For the breeze
Drowns out the noise
Of broken
Toys.
In this wood
A tree
Fall
Could end all
This modernity,
Leaving no rhyme
Behind.
The self-scan says goodbye.
Elsewhere, a solitary man
Issues a command
To a webcam
And a literary guy
Wanders The Wasteland.
I dreamed of Homer.
And of Odysseus the roamer,
And a wine red sea.
But awoke to this Modernity.
My clock’s chime
Is out of time,
Yet I care not
For I see
In my clock
A protest, against modernity.
“Will people still read poetry in 100 years time?”, my friend Toby said as we sat in a pub in central London. “Yes” I replied.
We live in a world obsessed with material things. Whether one is watching a production of “Wuthering Heights” on commercial television or a trashy talent show, the advertisements are sure to interrupt one’s viewing with tedious regularity. Beautiful women imply that if men purchase certain products they will obtain the girl of their dreams, while other comercials exhort us to buy the latest gadgets (even though those we own are hardly out of their packaging and work perfectly well). Given this world of plastic smiles, where the sun always shines, its tempting to think that poetry is irrelevant as we find ourselves through endless consumption of products.
The idea that we are drowning in a sea of vapid consumerism is far from new. Take, for example William Wordsworth’s 19th-century poem “The World Is Too Much With us”:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn”.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us).
Wordsworth is right when he says “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”. Indeed in this age of the internet and 24-hour television his poem is, perhaps even more relevant than when he penned it. However, modernity which as brought us TV shows where the foolish and the inadequate make fools of themselves for the enjoyment of the viewers, has also ushered in a plethora of high quality classic serials (and full length dramatisations) in which the great works of literature fill our screens. Technology now exists which allows the recording of programmes while disregarding the commercial break. Tech is, indeed a double-edged sword!
The internet is full of vapid celebrities living “perfect” lives. It is, however also replete with websites and blogs which furnish everything from William Wordsworth to William Shakespeare. The web also allows poets who might otherwise have languished unread to gain a following (and perhaps fame) in the digital age.
So in answer to my friend Toby, I conclude by saying that the glass is neither full nor empty. It is somewhere between those two states. Advertising may drive us bonkers (this is certainly true with me), however one can find solace in poetry which proliferates both in print and online.
As always I would be interested in the perspectives of my readers.
Kevin
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.
Sitting in this autum garden I
Hear aircraft from the nearby
Airport. The breeze
Rustles in the trees,
Then modernity’s din
Muscles in yet again,
As another plane
Flies by
Competing with the wind’s sigh.
Give me something real
Not this plastic I feel.
Give me books in cloth boards
That I may not be bored.
Give me a chime
To measure time.
Give me solid wood
To caress and love.
Give me objects that last
A link to the past.
The world moves fast
Vast
Nothingness beccons.
Enumerable seconds
engaged
In rage
Against the gleam
Of the machine
That haunts my dream.
K Morris - Poet 