Day: October 17, 2018

Save the rich

At last I have achieved what I most need
Is it money, fame or love or war?
I’ve got writer’s block and painful knees

This block I have proves I once wrote at speed
With words that rose up from my heart’s deep core
At last I have  been given what I need

Are there markets which will buy my pleas?
What I fear the most is that I bore
I’ve got writer’s block and  knobbly knees

I could run a class on minds diseased
If I did I’d speak up from the floor
At last I have  been  offered what I need

A teacher on a podium might freeze
Like google drive , like love which we ignore
I’ve got writer’s block and ancient knees

 

Save the rich from greed and envy pure
From starving , from homelessness, the poor
At last I have achieved what   noone  knew
I’ve got  sex free socks and gendered knees

 

A dark lilac November sky

Old man,bending over,
arched like a fallen moon
in a dark lilac November sky.
Joy and pain wrestle my heart across the emptiness
and toss it up like a damp rocket
to fall in a hidden corner where mice live.
Would that not be a good ending,to be dust
to these little creatures nesting
in my chewed green twine and my tartan basket?
They have eyes and shiver in my hand when I rescue them
from the cat,
as any heart might.
Now night falls on the newspaper basket
where the damp Times and the Guardian mix into glue
and tomorrow the sun will rise
and it will just be the garbage
with no poetic undertones nor deathly hushes..
Heather and a silver light
you stand on a hill top like a god
looking over his domain.
Strong and now weak
it’s the humane condition
Everlasting life is too dangerous for humans.
Silent,motionless,home of beetles
bit by bit we fall away
into the mother soil
with cracked jugs and dropped coins
for a future academic to dig into.
Transparent hand touches me.
Whose might it be but yours?

Haiku Economics

dsc000751https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69633/haiku-economics

 

Quote:I was teaching economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology when I made the haiku-economics connection. I needed to connect with 225 economics, science, and engineering majors—college kids who were being trained to believe that poetry and feelings are not important to, say, the World Bank. At the same time I was reading The Essential Etheridge Knight and falling in love with haiku. I thought about the inability of standard economic models to explain bubbles, crashes, and global inequality—and how market fundamentalists refuse to discuss them. I saw the bridge I needed in this poem:

Invisible hand;
Mother of inflated hope,
Mistress of despair!

Adam Smith, indeed. Perhaps it’s the economists who can learn the most from poets about precision and efficiency, about objectivity and maximization—the virtues, in other words, of value-free science.

Ironically, the benefit of the addition is in the cost. The typical haiku budget constraint is limited by three lines of seventeen syllables. Basho himself understood well the joyful paradox of haiku economics: less is more, and more is better! Each poem is the length of about one human breath. This constraint, though severe, is more than offset by a boundless freedom to feel:

Window reflection—
The baby sparrow sitting,
Listening to glass.

I do not yet possess ironic wit

I do not yet possess ironic wit
Yet often I amuse the readers’ ears
Just as my cat once bit me as I sat
Confessing sins, my scruples and my fears.

When one   man left me as I was so bright
Yet others told me  I was  dim and vain
The irony here affects my  once sweet nights
We see in others what we most disdain

Would you tell a lover they were dumb?
Would you tell a lover they smelled queer?
Would you tell a lover you  hate  men?
Would you tell  one they seem insincere?

We see in others sin which dwells in us.
Perpetuating  malice  as  we boss.

What is irony in poetry?

man wearing welding helmet welding metal near gray brick wall
Photo by Movidagrafica Barcelona on Pexels.com

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/irony

 

“As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant. Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the contradiction. When William Shakespeare relates in detail how his lover suffers in comparison with the beauty of nature in “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun,” it is understood that he is elevating her beyond these comparisons; considering her essence as a whole, and what she means to the speaker, she is more beautiful than nature. “