DrBacchus' Journal

(Inspired by Ode to the Maker of Odes, and by a brief visit with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in his home in Colombo.)

In Sir Arthur's Parlor
Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2006
June 5, 2008

The hand that grasped the rungs
down the gravity well into Rama,
held up a bone to tap
on a black monolith,
and held the pen
that wrote the stories of my youth,
clasped mine, for just that moment.

That hand, robbed of all its strength
by the long years,
but which gave its strength
to a constellation of dreams,
including mine.

I held it gently
afraid to bruise
that which had created
the worlds in which I spent my childhood.

The eyes that stared into space
full of stars
for just that moment looked into mine,
saw me
as a fellow writer.

A poet is one who says, beautifully, the things that we all think, mundanely, and are embarrassed to put into words.

Ode to the Maker of Odes reminds me of the brief moment I spent visiting with Arthur C. Clarke, and that instant in which we clasped one another's right hand, and looked in each other's eyes.

And, yes, I gave him a small toy as I left, and have wondered often what became of it.

Obligations To Ire

For the Weekend Wordsmith prompt Carrying A Grudge.

It takes enormous endurance
to remain angry,
even when you provide fresh reasons
day following day,
reopening wounds so old,
the original injury is a blur
in the broken rear-view mirror.

Sure, it flares up, fueled
by your careless actions,
selfish remarks, and callous manners,
but, most days, the petulant child
that you have become
merely buzzes, a trapped blue bottle
battering the panes
on a summer day when I'd rather
just be reading by the creek.

The grudge, long since
become an immovable burden,
shackled to me by a cable
of hatred and weary rage,
is to, too heavy to carry --
more like drag.

But so sure as I unfetter,
and try to escape,
you fling a hawser or two
around my raw, chafed ankles,
and remind me of my
obligations to ire.

Storms

We stand here, high on the hill,
and watch the rains come
like an African monsoon
sweeping across the desiccated
plains, dry dusty barren.

So many of these storms
lately, we just watch it come,
resigned
to the deluge that we know
we can't run fast enough
to escape. Our sadness

washes around us, even
as the rain, so long in coming,
so feared and so anticipated,
soaks our upturned faces,
hides our tears.

All very cliché, of course,
which isn't to say it's not real,
just that it's universal.

No one gets to their heaven
without a fight.

And some never
get there at all,
though they fight, seemingly,
without a respite
while the storm rages.

Those of us who have found
it, by persistence or dumb luck,
may, now and then, offer
a brief shelter
to those who, so far, haven't.

Yesterday I drove past that place
I used to live,
on the way home to you.

I cowered behind that very window,
afraid
of the world outside,
afraid
that it wouldn't miss me,
that it wouldn't notice
that I had vanished behind that frame.

I watched, through that frame,
others living the life
I could not live,
because I was
afraid,
I knew not of what,

nor why I had been exiled
to this penitentiary
which I paid good money
to inhabit.

There, framed in that window,
another lonely soul
gazed out at me, wondering
if I saw as I went on my way,
past this refuge of those
too young to have lived,
and those done with it.