(for Master LeRoy Clarke, prince, poet, painter, philosopher, patriarch,
photographs of whose paintings adorned the walls of my room in 1970)
I spent a Frosty Christmas
In my warm December tropics;
Robert, Pinsky, Browning, Burns and others
I read on poetic, philosophic topics.
The uncaged birds they ate my banana
And sang their freedom song;
I swear I heard the sonorous voice of Maya
Say, “Freedom is an onerous illusion.”
That man, like D. H. Lawrence,
Be doomed to condemnation;
The beast among the birds and flowers
(A rose by any other name’s a thorn?)
I surfed the wondrous worldwide web
In search of Walcott, LeRoi and roots;
I got the Jones and the Laureate herb
But found no Clarke except the boots.
The uncaged birds they ate my banana
Then bruised their heads on window glass;
They came in through the open door
But departing could not find the pass.
I spent my Christmas money,
All, on Kipling, Keats and Yeats;
A solace to my lonely, my only
Feasts were served on meditative plates.
Copyright ©2001 by G. Newton V. Chance
- G. NEWTON V. CHANCE
- 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.
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