Wish that I had died a child,
Returned to heaven undefiled;
That I had, then, the divine sense
To preserve my soul in innocence.
When first I drank sweet mother’s milk,
Believing life was of that ilk;
But then for knowledge did I thirst
And learning, wondered which was worst,
The naive bliss and ignorance
Of foolish men which knows no fear
Or the tortures of a conscience
Captive in dungeons of despair.
Love can be blind, love can pretend,
Though faint and fickle, to be true;
Cursed be the day, the hour when,
With love’s blind eyes, I first saw you.
In time rejected hearts will heal
Then straightway all the pain forget
And wounded warriors flesh congeal
To thwart and taunt grim, greedy death.
The eye cannot itself perceive
‘Cept mirrored in the tears it grieves
And God, to Adam He gave Eve
To wash his back, not to deceive.
When God first made the Universe
By invocation of the verse;
Said let there be and it was good,
Establishing supreme the Word
(The pen is sharper than the sword.)
Heaven acknowledged, Earth obeyed
Till wily Snake he did persuade
One third angels and all mankind
To peel the fruit and eat the rind
(“Thou shall not die,” the Imp opined.)
And Death he weaves a woeful tale
Of men who sought to no avail
By ballot box and election
Political succession;
And failing, many crowns impaled
Through treach'rous coupe and treason,
Only to wake up and discover,
To their woe and abject terror,
That the monster they created
Did naught but seek to perpetrate
Perpetual war, bloodshed and hate
As it stalked the land unsated.
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.
