Poetry
Just took a bath while my daughter read to me, 'Gunga Din'
Then I put her to bed and read to her, 'The Cremation of Sam Magee' and Laughter I Laugh at Life: its antics make for me a giddy game, Where only foolish fellows take themselves with solemn aim. I laugh at pomp and vanity, at riches, rank and pride; At social inanity, at swager, swank and side. At poets, pastry-cooks and kings, at folk sublime and small, Who fuss about a thousand things that matter not at all; At those who dream of name and fame, at those who scheme for pelf. . . . But best of all the laughing game - is laughing at myself. Some poet chap had labelled man the noblest work of God: I see myself a charlatan, a humbug and a fraud. Yea, 'spite of show and shallow wit, an sentimental drool, I know myself a hypocrite, a coward and a fool. And though I kick myself with glee profoundly on the pants, I'm little worse, it seems to me, than other human ants. For if you probe your private mind, impervious to shame, Oh, Gentle Reader, you may find you're much about the same. Then let us mock with ancient mirth this comic, cosmic plan; The stars are laughing at the earth; God's greatest joke is man. For laughter is a buckler bright, and scorn a shining spear; So let us laugh with all our might at folly, fraud and fear. Yet on our sorry selves be spent our most sardonic glee. Oh don't pay life a compliment to take is seriously. For he who can himself despise, be surgeon to the bone, May win to worth in others' eyes, to wisdom in his own. --- Robert Service |
That's a nice one.
"Foodie" that I am, I once read this to my kids Osso Buco I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence. And best of all, the secret marrow, the invaded privacy of the animal prized out with a knife and swallowed down with cold, exhilarating wine. I am swaying now in the hour after dinner, a citizen tilted back on his chair, a creature with a full stomach-- something you don't hear much about in poetry, that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation. you know: the driving rain, the boots by the door, small birds searching for berries in winter. But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest, and I can only close my eyes and listen to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance and the sound of my wife's laughter on the telephone in the next room, the woman who cooked the savory osso buco, who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted. She who talks to her faraway friend while I linger here at the table with a hot, companionable cup of tea, feeling like one of the friendly natives, a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son. Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillside on bleeding knees and palms, an Irish penitent carrying the stone of the world in his stomach; and elsewhere people of all nations stare at one another across a long, empty table. But here, the candles give off their warm glow, the same light that Shakespeare and Izaac Walton wrote by, the light that lit and shadowed the faces of history. Only now it plays on the blue plates, the crumpled napkins, the crossed knife and fork. In a while, one of us will go up to bed and the other will follow. Then we will slip below the surface of the night into miles of water, drifting down and down to the dark, soundless bottom until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still, below the shale and layered rock, beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure, into the broken bones of the earth itself, into the marrow of the only place we know. Billy Collins The image of the lion of contentment always gets me. |
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