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Dystopia
Reality is never what it seems
To be. It hides itself in shrouds of mist,
In bulging envelopes of gilded dreams,
In requisite pronations of the wrist
That guides the palsied hand that holds the pen.
What good is it to cry that life’s unfair
If one does not possess the acumen
To seize the wealth that’s drifting everywhere
Around us? Everything is up for grabs
When poor administrators drop the ball
And scientists abandon working labs,
Which, sadly, brings all progress to a stall.
We seek the counsel of our oldest friends,
But what we get is spurious advice,
And this is where a cherished friendship ends.
For simple honesty we pay a price.
A pack of lies is taken for the truth,
The bitter for the sweet, and dark for light;
The world cannot supply enough vermouth
To help a harried human sleep at night.
The Family now is ridiculed, proclaimed
A habitude whose time has come and gone;
Our honored institutions have been maimed,
And shameless malefactors freely spawn.
When dense penumbral clouds obscure the sun,
When smoke from burning buildings fills the air,
And justice, faith, and hope are on the run,
We tend to make a virtue of despair.
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Freewheeling
The preservation of the central radix
From which profound philosophies arise
Requires much more than ordinary hay-ricks
To guarantee a store of opened eyes
Come spring. It’s in our nature to obsess
About the details of the fluid world
In which we’ve all been swimming. Nonetheless,
The wall against which our complaints are hurled
Is solid as Gibraltar. It resists
Assaults more easily than mortal flesh
Can fend disease or rid itself of cysts,
And howsoever gladly we refresh
Ourselves in salutary mineral springs,
Magnesium can only go so far
To reinvigorate our flagging wings
And reconfigure what we truly are.
Although it’s laudable to think before we act,
Deliberation’s not our strongest suit,
And caution’s just a moldy artifact
Of stuffy rule books long considered moot.
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
You are a lovely gardener of words and thoughts…thank you for your poems. Allegra
You are quite welcome, Allegra. Perhaps I’ll post some recipes one of these days.
“Dystopia” is truly a poem of this day and age. Sometimes a poem cannot be written unless it grows in the atmosphere of a certain period. Excellent work, but also deeply sad.
“Sad,” Joseph, is the perfectly apposite term, especially when it comes to friendships sundered due to deep political divides and when it comes to the prospect of the entirety of Western civilization being canceled. Let’s see what the soft leftists think when we train no more physicians or engineers, and every dwelling has been burned to the ground. This is not a time in which I would have wanted my children (and especially, now, my granddaughters) to be born. Let’s go back to those good old uninteresting times.
C.B., I think these are both evocative, intriguing and– especially your “Dystopia” – far too relevant. “Dystopia” manages to catalog most of society’s ills economically, vividly and — to my surprise — quite movingly when addressing the circumstances of “where a cherished friendship ends.” Relationships have become much more difficult to maintain in the polarization that has taken place concerning the most basic of issues. The despair you describe does seem to be inevitable and longterm. It’s difficult to see a pathway out.
Your “Freewheeling” poem is fascinating — the imagery is striking and seems pulled together from a great variety of sources — philosophies, hay stacks, swimming and then hitting that Gibralter-like wall (a metaphor for God?) I’ve read through this poem a few times now and what I get from it is something of a meditation on aging, mortality and the fearlessness that can (perhaps should) come with age. I will read it again because I feel certain that I am missing ideas in it. But the ideas that I have picked up so far are wonderful.
Yes, Brian, one can tell that the world is in a sad state when despair seems a more reasonable approach to it. Hope is a cardinal virtue and despair is its opposite, but as William F. Buckley said on the eve of Bill Clinton’s election when asked whether he thought there was any hope that Clinton would be a good President (to paraphrase), “Well, as a Roman Catholic I am required to have hope, but I see no reasonable evidence that would lead me to expect the outcome that you suggest.”
In the second poem, I think Gibraltar represents sublunary entities such as Government etc. In a strange way, growing old is actually good news because it means that one is still alive. Any ideas you gather from it are perfectly valid. After all, it’s not as though I wrote it with a detailed outline in hand. I will say this: When one is old there is less worry about ruining one’s future.
My favorite line in “Dystopia” is ‘For simple honesty we pay a price’, because that is an undeniable truth, as are your other lines. We find out who our true friends are when differing opinions are respected, or taken as an affront.
The thoughts in “Freewheeling” are equally well expressed, with unexpected rhyme pairings including ‘radix/hay-ricks.
Thank you, David. To be perfectly honest, finding good lines and unexpected end rhymes is what makes writing these little poems so much fun. Maintaining coherence and cohesion throughout a poem can be a bit tedious, and I often neglect that important aspect of any work aspiring to become good or great art.
C.B., both poems are admirably crafted, as usual. I always appreciate your fresh eye and skill where rhymes are concerned. “Dystopia” is my firm favorite. You say all I strive to say in my poems with a poignancy and poise I can only aspire to. You have tapped into horrors of today with subtlety and a gloomy beauty that echos the heft of my heart. I’m in awe.
You make me blush, Susan, which is a good thing because it means that blood is rushing into my face and, I would like to hope, into my brain. Your poems never lack poignancy or poise, and though I really don’t want you to do this, if you forego some of the “special effects” you are famous for, then you might end up with something closer to what you say you aspire to.
Thank you for your tip C.B. I’m going to have a word with my boisterous muse… I’ll see if she’s willing to calm down a little for my next serious poem.
Even your funniest poems are dead serious, Susan, and don’t you forget that.
That way, everybody wins.