Tag Archives: humans

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Wine Cellar’

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Down in the cobwebbed cellars of the mind
fabulous wines you don’t dare drink are stored,
each carrying a price you can’t afford;
so you pass by, deliberately blind.
Upstairs a loved one, dreamier than a vision,
displays each quality your soul desires –
or is a mere projection from the fires
the building’s furnace stokes with soft derision.
Your passions aren’t alive, alight, upstairs:
your love a mere projection of the schemes
the animated house evolves. Your dreams
live in your basement, though you’re unawares.
Though Bacchus urge you to uncork that wine,
the world would find it filthy, not divine.

*****

What I like about Rat’s Ass Review is that the editor will acknowledge and deal with the darker sides of being human… Not horror stories which are mostly pretty simplistic; but poems about the darkness built into all social animals. RAR is a rare journal: full spectrum, light and dark. This sonnet is in the current issue; thanks, Roderick Bates!

Photo: “Wine barrels in an old cellar” by Ivan Radic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Semi-formal? or Spoken Word? RHL, ‘Life is a Bubble’

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A life is a bubble:
somewhere the Grand Druid
dips his wand into the universal fluid
and then a new life is formed, floating
on chance breezes until it – pops –
and the thin skin coating
falls back to earth as mere drops,
the shape and rare rainbow glint gone to air,
and the bubble is where?

Earth is a bauble
in the universal flux,
as it foams, boils and freezes,
just dust from God’s various mucks,
sneezes afloat on chance trans-solar breezes.

The humans babble,
rabble rising from the rubble of other lives cut to stubble,
they burble some Bible as they gab, grab and gobble,
cobbling conning towers of Babel and Hubble,
their progress hobbled by their wobbly bobble,
reams of hopes, dreams and schemes
just a bubble.

*****

Sometimes a chance-occurring phrase in some moody mode of thought lets me ramble wildly through tangled words and ideas. It’s not amenable to regular form, but it’s fun. It seems in the spirit of Spoken Verse, though I’ve never performed. The earliest poem I wrote in this style is from over 50 years ago… which is 30 years before I ever had a poem accepted for publication. I was definitely out of step with the non-verse that then controlled the poetry industry to the exclusion of almost all actual verse. Things have eased in recent years, and dozens of poems from those early years have since been published. (Note to struggling young poets: Don’t give up! But have another career that pays money!)

Anyway, ‘Life is a Bubble’ only needed a couple of years to be published in 2024 in The Lyric.

Photo: “Blowing bubbles” by Song_sing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Barbara Lydecker Crane: ‘The African Elephants’ Report’

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Small herds of Two-Legs roll across the plain
and stop to stare at us in our domain.

They rumble in their giant metal hunks,
which belch the fumes that irritate our trunks.

These creatures demonstrate a lack of strength.
They seldom run, nor walk for any length.

We assume their eyesight is defective:
the flat things that they click must be corrective.

Why do they retreat from every shower,
since rain-washed hide will dry within the hour?

When darkness comes these creatures enter tents
and miss the night-shift intrigue of events.

As for their young, we’ve spotted precious few—
a doubtful future, from our point of view.

We shake our heads when Two-Leg herds arrive.
We have concluded they will not survive.

*****

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “I wrote this while looking at videos of wildlife in Tanzania – in one, an elephant was peering into a tent with excited humans inside, whispering and filming; I had fun imagining that the elephant had been sent by his herd on a reconnaissance mission, and would report back to them.”

Barbara Lydecker Crane, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist in 2017 and  2019, has received two Pushcart nominations and several awards.  Her poems have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, Measure, THINK, and many others.  Her fourth collection, entitled You Will Remember Me (sonnets in the imagined voices of artists through history, with many color images of artwork) is about to be published by Able Muse Press. 

Photo: “Addo Elephant Park, South Africa” by exfordy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd poem: ‘The Mother’ or ‘Thanks’ (‘Dank’es!’) NOT by Adolf Hitler (my apologies about the post!)

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When your mother has grown old,
And you have grown older
When what used to be easy and effortless
Has now become a burden to her,

When her dear, faithful eyes
no longer see life as they once did,
When her tired feet
don’t want to carry her any more while walking. –

Then give her your arm to support,
Accompany her with pleasure –
The hour is coming. When you, weeping,
Must accompany her on her last walk!

And if she asks you a question, then give her an answer.
And if she asks again, then answer!
And if she asks yet again, answer again,
Not impatiently, but with gentle calm.

And if she cannot understand you properly
Explain her everything happily.
The hour will come, the bitter hour,
When her mouth asks no more.

Wenn deine Mutter alt geworden / Und älter du geworden bist
Wenn ihr, was früher leicht und mühelos / Nunmehr zur Last geworden ist,
Wenn ihre lieben, treuen Augen / Nicht mehr, wie einst, ins Leben seh’n
Wenn ihre müd’ gewordnen Füße / Sie nicht mehr tragen woll’n beim Gehen. –
Dann reiche ihr den Arm zur Stütze, / Geleite sie mit froher Lust –
Die Stunde kommt. Da du sie weinend / Zum letzten Gang begleiten musst!
Und fragt sie dich, so gib ihr Antwort. / Und fragt sie wieder, sprich auch du!
Und fragt sie noch mehr, steh ihr Rede, / Nicht ungestüm, in sanfter Ruh!
Und kann sie dich nicht recht verstehen, / Erklär’ ihr alles froh bewegt.
Die Stunde kommt, die bitt’re Stunde, / Da dich ihr Mund nach nichts mehr fragt!

*****

This poem is actually from Georg Runsky (pen name of Karl Wilhelm August Georg Runschke). It appeared in 1906 under the title “Habe Geduld!” in his book “Blüthen des Herzens”.

Rightwing groups have claimed that it is a 1923 poem by Hitler about his mother Klara Hitler who had died in 1907. He seems to have loved her very deeply… but he was a painter, not a poet. His mother had been cared for by the Jewish Doctor Eduard Bloch, and Hitler painted the picture above of the doctor’s house in 1913. So what? So Hitler was a Malignant Narcissist like an unfortunate number of powerful modern politicians and businesspeople. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t capable of love or artistic impulses; you can have them and still be a narcissist. People who insist that there is pure evil in the world (whether Nazism or Judaism) are themselves a lot of the problem. Personally, I have a lot of difficulty with both Nazism and Judaism (and Communism and Christianity, and anyone who insists they are Right and they Know because their Leader or their Book says so), but I also have family and friends of all those persuasions. I don’t respect them for their authoritarian tendencies, but I also don’t think they are pure evil. The demonising of people who you disagree with or fear or are jealous of, that’s the start of the problem. We’re all people, and people are apes after all. Some people are stupid, some are intelligent but uneducated, some are sick, some have genetic defects, some were badly raised, some are sociopaths… then study them, try to make them better human beings, and in the meantime make sure they don’t have access to guns. Thank you. Rant over.

Photo: Watercolour by Adolph Hitler, 1913, House of Dr. Bloch. https://www.wikiart.org/en/adolf-hitler/maison-du-dr-bloch-1913