To poets, lovely Denmark’s not a friend:
there’s too much commonsense, it’s too prosaic.
These blonds just blindly make life a bland blend;
but life should be a salad, a mosaic.
Long live the Christiania anarchists!
Bare feet, graffiti, dog shit, broken glass!
Runaways, pushers, folk on Wanted lists,
the type you’re careful around when they pass.

Well, maybe I exaggerate… I love
museums, bike lanes, all the walking streets,
orderly lines where people never shove,
the clean green parks, the clean stores full of treats…
And after all, I write in sonnet form:
a lovely, useful, ordinary norm.

*****

I wrote this sonnet last month in Denmark, and it was published in the June Snakeskin, an all-rhyme issue. (I’ve tinkered with the title and one of the lines…) The opposing arguments for personal freedom and social responsibility are hardly new, and I agree with both. Perhaps I need to reread Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy‘… <downloads> <peers>… hm… no, too much religion.

Photo: Postcard in Snakeskin