Poetic Moods

Sometimes it is difficult to reply when someone asks you what your favourite poem is. Every poem is unique, every poem has different objects, voices, messages, allusions, cadences and characters. So today, as I woke up, I felt compelled to share one of my favourite poems. Which poems do you class as one of your favourites? Comments below.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias, by Percy B Shelley

 

Haunting, depressing, aggressive, defiant and empty, all at the same time. These are the five words I would use to describe this poem. After reading it, which five words would you choose to describe this poem? I look forward to your answers…

Introversion

The man sat across me has a vacant stare

Deep and morbid and empty and bare

He shifts and glances but he cannot see

Then through narrow eyes, looks right at me

His bloodied eyes go through my soul

I imagine no heart but an empty hole

He conveys a message of dread and fear

Not encompassing, but he is all I can hear

I hear the terror emanating from his heart

He sees my turmoil like a piercing dart

I hear the pain upon his breath so foul

He sees my panic making me howl

I hear his soft cries muffled and violent

He sees my ache and stays entirely silent

Nothing remains now but that lasting decay

He will mimic all that I do until that final day

‘I know him well and he knows me too’

I look straight at him and he says ‘I’m you’.

 

If Shylock was a Palestinian…

I am a Palestinian.

Hath not a Palestinian eyes?

Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;

fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,

healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by

the same winter and summer as an Israeli is?

If you prick us do we not bleed?

If you tickle us do we not laugh?

If you poison us do we not die?

And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

If a Palestinian wrong an Israeli, what is his humility? Revenge.

If an Israeli wrong a Palestinian,

what should his sufferance be by an Israeli example? Why, revenge.

The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

           (Amended Shylock’s speech from A Merchant of Venice by W. Shakespeare)

Tears of Gaza

Blank expressions and dirt smeared faces where

Once the personality of a child resided, lived

Now bloodied, emptied, alone and in despair

Oh children of Gaza you are all insignificant

Cry as you might, the world does not care

Die as you might it means nothing out here

Your innocence snatched and lives shackled

Your futures in doubt, broken and battered