Monday, June 3, 2013

BROWN WHEELBARROW

"So much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow..." William Carlos Williams

So much more depended on the chickens
than a red wheelbarrow.

Not the assembly line fast-grow, force-grow,
couped-up white chicken of today
but the free verse common fowl
farm fertilizing yardie
Rhode island, frizzle fowl and clean-neck cock;
the ever reliable fore-day
morning "cook curry ochro" crowing
country clock waking up to fry egg,
boil egg, scramble egg, raw egg with orange
or milk and stout; the vociferous fuss
and commotion "cock, cock, me lay" cluck
of a laying hen announcing to all
and sundry, fresh eggs for the plunder
or the round oh! oval of surprise,
delight of discovery
by schoolboy of uncharted nest
filled with young eggs before malfeasance
of mitosis intervened;
to say nothing of the drumstick, wishbone,
wings and feet reserved for Sunday lunch.

Who needed to push a red wheelbarrow
when we had a low maintenance, low
pollutant auto wheelbarrow needing no gas
but grass, the oxymoron of a dumb jackass
that, saddled with cocoa, ground provision
or gravel would refuse to overload,
grin, bare big teeth and snap at you, fart
and fling kick at your knee like Bruce Lee
or Wang Yu, refuse to budge,
lie down with the load, roll around
on the ground and refuse to get up
till it well and proper felt to do so;
or if by chance Jenny should pass,
go berserk with donkey fever
to hell with you and your labour;
ignore the cruel whiplash, laugh in your face
and bray "haw hee haw hee" as if to say
to the world "look at this dumb jackass
inflicting cruelty on what he thinks
is a dumb jackass beast of burden,

not seeing the beautiful,
strong and stubborn creature of resistance
with its own mind, willing to cooperate
when treated with respect and dignity;

forgetting is I who bore a Man-God
on my back to Jerusalem to bear
the cruel whiplash, to die
and live again to save the world."

So much depended upon
a brown wheelbarrow.

by G. Newton V. Chance ©2013 

No comments:

My photo
George Newton Vivian Chance (Trinidad and Tobago) -- member of the Poet Society of Trinidad and Tobago, http://poetssocietytt.blogspot.com/ and the World Poets Society, http://world-poets.blogspot.com/ -- born in Tobago on 3rd March 1957. While residing at Rio Claro was inspired to write over a hundred poems at the turn of the Millennium. Hobbies include playing wind instruments, building computers, observing nature, reading and writing poetry. Believes that the power of a song is in its ability to evoke emotions by the marriage of lyric and music but that music without lyric can be just as powerful, that lyric without music can also be just as powerful, that there is music in the lyric and that lyric can be simple yet profound. Also, in this the age of computers, would like to model his lines after simple and efficient code and, analogous to Object Oriented Programming, achieve most of his imagery from nouns and verbs, avoiding the bloat and excess of unnecessary adjectives. This is what he aspires to attain in his poetry.

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

by Langston Hughes

the poet writes the poem;
the reader gives it life
(© G. Newton V. Chance)
Make somebody happy (© Alexander Ligertwood & Carlos Santana)

Followers

Viva Visitors

Caribbean Literary Salon

Total Pageviews


marketing courses  Creative Commons License
http://newton-chance.blogspot.com by http://newton-chance.blogspot.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at newton-chance.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://newton-chance.blogspot.com.