Oh, this land is a pleasant place
For them that’s rich and high
But this land is a fogged up place
For wretched folk as I.
Land of holy days and holidays where
Wealth and power prosecute and persecute
The destitute and prostitute
With sticks and stones and brittle bones
Of old philosophies and old theologies
While pimps and paedo-priests walk free
On honey-roasted city streets, fronting
For the crime and grime of filthy slum-
Lords; the buccaneers never left.
Oh, this land is a pleasant place
For them that’s rich and high
But this land is a fogged up space
For wretched folk as I.
There’s a smug and smoggy skettel bird,
Singing with shrill discord,
A dying kettle’s whistle
Of steam and boiling blood,
While corbeaus in peacock feathers
Lip-sync in stinking galleries,
On sinking galley stages
Of shrinking work and wages.
In this tropic transience of things
Garish billboards proclaim obituaries,
With graphic, graffiti obscenities,
Nocturnal festivities at the Club-
Foot of estranged hills and gullies.
Another city folds and crumples;
Skyscrapers fall and crumble
Into rubble like crisply shattered crackers;
Protect us, Lord, from all disasters.
Do not wait up or weep, my love.
Where night goes, Knight Templars may not return
But rest assured the morning cock will crow
And by the sun the mongrel morn shall burn
The aspirations of the tyrant day
Whose kingdom is a harsh and cruel land.
Oh, this land is a pleasant place
For them that’s rich and high
But this land is a fogged up place
For wretched folk to live... or die.
Copyright ©2011 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.
1 comment:
I see that Hemingway is one of your favorite writers. I love his writing because of the simplicity of his sentence structure, which despite that, shows great depth. Becaue of his writing style, he is one of the first writers whose work I introduce to my students for whom English is a second language. I have to take them into consideration.
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