#poem #poetry #amwriting #sketchbook

I recall my father as a godly man
though he never went to church
    or joined a union
his faith found expression
without need of intercesson in a purer protestantism
    unalloyed with dogma

he would laugh
                were he not dead
to find his simple joy in animals and birds
reflected in the new age revival

in unfair moments of my youth
I would scorn his independence
unrealising
that his brand of tory whiggishness
more closely resembled my own high tory values
    that masqueraded in socialism
    seeking to find something or someone
    to belong to
 more closely than either of us would accept

and I was reminded of this somewhat yesterday
when I happened upon a screed
that passed as poetry 
                                 - just barely -
taking as it's theme who reads poems

    no doubt it was a crie-de-couer
an ernest evocation of the youthful contempt
of that enevitable moment when childhood ends
    when all assumptions of fraternity float like lilies
and one learns the hard lesson that money buys time

laughing at the absurdity of the author
   who was
   rejecting and condemning their nationhood
   for past crimes
   without which they would be here
clutching shame to their cliched heart
with all the passion of a four year old denied sweets

took me bad to those evenings
when gentle discussion of waterhouse or pilger
    would circle into a vortex
    always ending in a theoretical condemnation
    of a theoretical conception of our opponent's position
    full stopped by trading hitler and stalin
as each of us led the other to the guillotine extreme                                   

It saddens me to think of the satire and poetry of a waterhouse column
                                                                           and how lucky we were
                                                                              without ever knowing