Apr 2016
i was but a foetus in a womb when Chernobyl happened; the women were told to drink iodine... never knew why, so obviously i was bound to end up like a mutant, given that the radioactivity winds where more potent than those of hot glass Sahara... if you're still stuck in Einstein's physics in terms of causality: cause and effect, i know by a golden standard that you're still confused... Newton's theories about certain things might have been wrong... but a punch is still a punch on the receiving body: a plum coloured blotch, a limo of the puffed up punched cheek of the area around the eye socket.
most these poems could be forgotten in an instant,
a blink of an eye to account for 365 sunrises
on an orb, dense with salty waters,
most of them could become dinosaur bones
on the flag of Wales, just like that! snap! click!
there... prehistory tangled on display
oddly rushed into a crowd of waving hands
with its fluttering creases...
but then i know what poetry is for...
it's not for galleries, not for exhibitions,
not freak shows... not stadiums with amassed
crowds shouting drunken grunts...
poetry isn't for that...
take Alla Ivanivna (aged 87), living in
the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a remote
place called Poliske, once inhabited by
20,000... later 20... 17 of which died,
leaving 3 ghosts... well, souls...
a rickety hut, snow through half the year,
Columbus birches (explorers of the forests,
the scouts of the forests),
she's there living on 40 euros a month,
her food gets delivered,
perhaps a stove to warm-up,
she survived the **** invasion,
the Soviet-induced famine,
her husband died when she was 20 in
a car crash...through the Stalinist repression,
and then Chernobyl...
and then she quotes TS Eliot -
an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing,
there... that's poetry... that's what poetry
is for... it's not an art to be shouted on rooftops,
it's not a honing device for you the bee
and the vast swarm to come looking for you...
Alla is a gallery, the purpose...
she remembers the good old days - and
she remembers a line from a poem...
memory is poetry's greatest ally,
actually poetry is a kind of memory,
perhaps a tool to peer into a vast vault of
images, given poetry is sometimes unheard
and encoded with these crude symbols...
you keep one line from a poem rather than the
whole poem like a trained monkey schoolchild
and your life flashes before your eyes over
the dim bleak vegetation of Ukrainian winters -
it's almost like a slap against Kant's categorical
imperative of working out your life with
one maxim, or with several, whatever;
and that's why it so ******* hurts to craft*.
most these poems could be forgotten in an instant,
a blink of an eye to account for 365 sunrises
on an orb, dense with salty waters,
most of them could become dinosaur bones
on the flag of Wales, just like that! snap! click!
there... prehistory tangled on display
oddly rushed into a crowd of waving hands
with its fluttering creases...
but then i know what poetry is for...
it's not for galleries, not for exhibitions,
not freak shows... not stadiums with amassed
crowds shouting drunken grunts...
poetry isn't for that...
take Alla Ivanivna (aged 87), living in
the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a remote
place called Poliske, once inhabited by
20,000... later 20... 17 of which died,
leaving 3 ghosts... well, souls...
a rickety hut, snow through half the year,
Columbus birches (explorers of the forests,
the scouts of the forests),
she's there living on 40 euros a month,
her food gets delivered,
perhaps a stove to warm-up,
she survived the **** invasion,
the Soviet-induced famine,
her husband died when she was 20 in
a car crash...through the Stalinist repression,
and then Chernobyl...
and then she quotes TS Eliot -
an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing,
there... that's poetry... that's what poetry
is for... it's not an art to be shouted on rooftops,
it's not a honing device for you the bee
and the vast swarm to come looking for you...
Alla is a gallery, the purpose...
she remembers the good old days - and
she remembers a line from a poem...
memory is poetry's greatest ally,
actually poetry is a kind of memory,
perhaps a tool to peer into a vast vault of
images, given poetry is sometimes unheard
and encoded with these crude symbols...
you keep one line from a poem rather than the
whole poem like a trained monkey schoolchild
and your life flashes before your eyes over
the dim bleak vegetation of Ukrainian winters -
it's almost like a slap against Kant's categorical
imperative of working out your life with
one maxim, or with several, whatever;
and that's why it so ******* hurts to craft*.
