Collection 13: Philosophical Poems
Epistemological Breakdown, Law and Liberty, Perspectives
Epistemological Breakdown
Somewhere in the great nowhere
Which is mostly where we live now
Hear silent thunder, watch the dark flashes
Of our war upon our minds.
From the freezing North
Blizzards of research papers bear
Proofs that there can never be anyone
At home to read them.
From fecund southern jungles
Simian hoots and squeals blare
Out the triumph of unreason
In the strangling dark.
Between gibberish and prose
Poets have nothing to say
So we let off a few fireworks
To defy the void.
There was once a healer
Who presided at the wedding
Of soul and substance, word and world
But we sacked him.
Broken homes bring banishment.
We tramp the streets of ransacked cities
Littered with scribbled papers,
Hooted and haunted.
Law and Liberty
Symbol of Rolling liberty
This wave’s exact curl
And dash upon the shore
Is no stampede of freedom:
Or deeper where the shark
Slides silent in the water
His fanged tyranny
Has not the sea’s licence:
Tide’s thrust and pulling gravity
Arrayed each molecule
Of the breaker’s curl
In precise delineation
Of its smash upon the sand
While shark is most subject
To sea’s voracious law
Shaping his deadly torpedo
Whose unhindered motion
Is desperate necessity –
He must swim or die.
So our thinking freedom
Lives by its limits:
This skater accepts the ice
With its bruising treachery,
Subdues herself to it
In months of wearing and
Gradually prolongs a curve
Or risks a flick –
Then can exploit the ice
Swooping in its pale sky
With our dreams of flight
With glide and dizzying spin
She has the freedom of the ice.
So the unstinting Giver
Neither shackles freedom in necessity
Nor unmakes order through licence
For His full majesty
Is His all-mastery
And our full liberty.
Comments
Post a Comment