If I could enfold you in blankets of red By fires of yellow to lighten your head, And give you relief from the cold, empty strife That has blown through the minutes that make up your life, Then, perhaps, you could see just what all of that meant As you sit warm and loved by the fireside curled -- My friend, there can be no more worthy time spent Than in trying to better yourself, and the world.
dreams lie, we listen. meant for bolder colors, we stave off doom in sleep, crafting stories of famous victories we'll never fight
surrender to the stillness; be at peace. the fire sits contained, yet spreads its warmth, and you, without much striving, still can be the light and heat that's needed in this place. give in to all you do not need to do: find comfort and assurance in such rest as can take in the moment as it is: you need only this stretch of time and space.
There was a once and long ago, That industry was everywhere; And though some hated those machines, We used them to increase our share Of all the good that this world had. And with those goods, we did more good: We sang in homes and in the bars, And it was simply understood That this was what the new world was. Alas, we didn't, couldn't know The good would move to somewhere else, And we'd be left with Long ago
I saw them in the sunlit park, And had to smile, knowing well How precious, and how brief, these times Can be, And yet how long the spell Can linger after. Even when The skies turn gray as hair and eyes, They'll still recall the sunlit park, For love's the thing that never Dies
(This post was inspired by the piece “Unzesty” from Renee over at “This Dead Horse”.)
When people tell you what a poem “means”, they are almost invariably telling you stuff about themselves, and only partially about the poem. Poems come to life through interaction with listeners or readers, so this seems only natural: any interpretation is telling you about that interaction, which necessarily contains the person who has said interpretation.
Like Renee in the blog post above, I can recall teachers who graded us on repeating back their own interpretations of poems, more-or-less verbatim; like her, I had to learn this the hard way, by failing a few quizzes before I caught on to the game being played. This didn’t seem like a practice calculated to building a love of poetry; it seemed more designed to create something like a cult around the professor, and there is a whole world to explore in that phenomenon.
Many of us want to appear as “oracles”, people whose insight into truth is not to be questioned. One need only go so far as Twitter to see screen after screen full of people who make assertions as to the ultimate truth of everything, and with serene confidence. I had professors, both in poetry and philosophy, who had little-to-no interest in developing the critical thinking skills of students: they had already obtained all truth, and it was the student’s job to ingest it and regurgitate it, unchanged.
It is easy to see the hallmarks of wounded ego in all of this. Very few people care about poetry — you can take it from me, I’ve been a philosopher and a poet — and the natural response of all of us who feel compelled to pursue interests few others have is to dismiss all others as a bunch of unfeeling idiots. They are not, of course, and it is only our desire to feel that our passions should be shared by the rest of the world that causes us to react this way.
I assumed that the teacher described in “Unzesty” himself thought pretty much nonstop about sex and death, so he saw it everywhere he looked. That human beings confute sex and power dynamics constantly is another topic about which many pages could be written, and a significant number of those would be dedicated to college professors and other people in positions of power.
If the concept of “privilege” means anything — and many dispute that the concept does mean anything, other that to be used as an empty pejorative — it is that no one sees all things objectively, and that honest perspectives on the meaning of things have equal validity. This is a vexing reality to all who love something so much that they become an expert on it.
Those other people, with their opinions. Geesh.
(For other posts from the Mighty Cheer Peppers, see here.)
They called her "Suzie Hotgirl". She'd lay out in the sun, And every guy that passed would wish That HE could be the one -- And many girls despised her, And found that hatred sweet -- This girl, who wanted only sun, But, rather, got The heat
her mom used to wash her hair in the bathtub, and they would laugh over shapes in the bubbles, back in her little girl days, before she herself became more serious, and her mom, more sad. she misses that time when the laughter she heard wasn't at the expense of others, and while there's no going back, she wishes she had taken more of that past with her
generalizing takes so much less energy than thinking seems to so she lives accordingly a person built from labels
