Tag Archives: Vladimir Putin

Sonnet: ‘Sad, Actually’

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Unreconstructed, with unhealthy heft—
the image of uncivilised great ape—
a fraud who tries to win by lies and theft,
a man who’d propagate by power and rape,
racist extoller of his genes alone,
a would-be genocidal patriarch,
successful in some twilight Darwin zone,
uncultured as a mugger in the park…
But note, behind the thin success veneer,
the shallow love of gold and gilt and glitz,
gloating dismissals and the bloated sneer,
the self-aggrandisement that never quits:
an unloved child’s in some deep down recess,
the secret of the man’s unhappiness.

*****

I can’t help feeling sorry for people who were raised so badly that they have never learnt to find security, inner peace, personal meaning. On the other hand I can’t help rejoicing when some destructive, selfish racist is exposed as a cheat and a fraud under the control of a foreign power, and is removed from positions of authority. I think of that sympathy/schadenfreud dichotomy as a healthily balanced contradiction; but then, I’m a Libra…

This sonnet (Shakespearean, being in iambic pentameter and rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) has just been published in Shot Glass Journal, an online journal of short poetry. Most of what they publish is not formal verse, but most of mine is.

Photo: “File:Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (2019-06-28) 06.jpg” by Presidential Press and Information Office is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

‘Sonnet Found in a Deserted Madhouse (fantasy of an alternative future)’

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The winds of winter wind through empty halls,
scraps of abandoned paper blow like leaves
to settle in odd corners of old walls.
Once a community lived here, but no one grieves:
the place was nothing but a wasteful home
for the sick, sad, psychotic and insane
who, locked in rooms or left alone to roam,
babbled their lives away, inept, inane.
All funding for the loonies has dried up;
guards, nurses, admin, tea ladies: dismissed.
And all because Brussels came out on top
and closed this home of British mental mist.
Now Big Ben chimes, tolling a final knell.
Farewell, old Houses; Westminster, farewell.

*****

As an Anglo-Dane raised in a third country, I’m naturally in favour of a borderless world. I loathe Brexit and the lies, greed and social inequities that allowed it to happen. Brexit and Trump were the two big foreign policy successes of Putin, stoking lies and fear and division. Sorry, rant over.

This Shakespearean sonnet was just published in the biannual poetry magazine Allegro, edited by Sally Long.

“Abandoned Dominican Building #2” by FotoGrazio is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Political poem: Bono’s St. Patrick’s Day poem on Zelenskyy

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Oh, St Patrick he drove out the snakes
With his prayers but that’s not all it takes
For the snake symbolises
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart, as it breaks

And the evil has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again

And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family
Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And St Patrick’s name now Zelenskyy

OK, first of all I recognise that the Saint Zelenskyy artwork by Liliya Rattari is a complimentary parody of either St Michael or St George, not St Patrick – but who cares? Putin is a big enough snake to rate as a dragon, and Zelenskyy is heroic enough to be any saint you want.

U2 frontman Bono‘s three-limerick poem was sent by him to Nancy Pelosi for her to use on St Patrick’s Day this year, and she read it at the Annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon in Washington to the assembled guests including the particularly Irish Joe Biden. The poem may not be good enough to be revered eternally, but nor is that snake Putin. Hopefully St Zelenskyy will chase Putin out of the country soon, and the sorrows of Ukraine will become as distant as the sorrows of Ireland.

Poem: ‘Leadership Transition’

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Julius Caesar, Antony, King Lear,
Hamlet, Macbeth – corrupted, vain, impure,
Irrational, bombastic, insecure –
He’s no more clarity or veritas
Than the deceptions of a covert war,
All morals blurred.

That tyrant rant, Tyrannosaurus roar,
Forecasts he’ll suffer a dictator’s fate:
His proud obsessed confusion first seems great,
Then grates, unravels at the seams, slips gear,
Loses its moral metaphors, grows crass;
He dies absurd.

Octavius, Malcolm, Edgar, Fortinbras,
Comes from the wings and strides to centre stage –
Competent, measured, reasonable, sane –
To rule the wreckage of the tragic reign;
Restores some structure, closes out the age,
Speaks the last word.

This archetypal character’s strong thump
Will get his nation out of the morass;
The raucous self-styled hero being dead,
A truer leader takes the throne instead.
(How Shakespeare’d end the Tragedy of Trump
Can be inferred.)

The common fate of Shakespeare’s flawed protagonists–death, and replacement by a more worthy ruler–is a story that humans enjoy and wish applied in their own times and countries… although they may naturally disagree on which ruler is disgraceful and which would be more worthy. Speaking for myself, I don’t need to see a death–I’d be happy for Putin and Trump to avoid assassination or jail by going into comfortable exile at a golf hotel in southern Russia. (You read it first here.) But Shakespeare would deal with them more definitively.

This poem is the third of the five poems published this month in The Brazen Head. Its four stanzas are in iambic pentameter with a short 6th line. The rhymes largely carry over between stanzas–the 6th lines only rhyme with each other. The rhymes and the stanza structure are designed to create a sense of satisfactory achievement–exactly what I feel with Biden taking over from Trump. (Similarly I would love to see Navalny take over from Putin, and almost anyone replace Boris Johnson.)

“York Minster – June 2013 – Emperor Constantine – One Cool Dude” by Gareth1953 All Right Now is marked with CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Thunderclouds’

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Lightning connecting heavens to the Earth
When heat, humidity grow thunderclouds–
Blackening, building to torrential floods–
Is how the Singularity will birth.
Then our new thunderous AI gods appear,
Growing and killing, Shiva-like, their wards.
(I, for one, welcome our new Overlords…)
Their lightning flashes blind, freighted with fear.
From rising mists and steams of consciousness
Poetry stormclouds, too, flash and connect.
When humans by our own AI are wrecked–
Our own connected selves and selflessness–
The Jovian bolts of electricity
Will be posthuman–and pure poetry.

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with Vlad the Bad‘s invasion of Ukraine. It is just part of my decades-long fascination with the way that technology is laying the foundations for AI that will be more powerful than humans, and for brain-to-brain communication that will move us to a Borg-like condition. And then what? It’s unknowable, but it will be the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine. Nature is in a permanent state of change and replacement and development, and humans are not exempt from being obsoleted. Not this year or next. But in 100 years, who knows what transitions will be happening?

This sonnet was first published in the Shot Glass Journal.

“Thunderhead” by Nicholas_T is licensed under WordPress Creative Commons