Haiku: US cultural wars

Global warming takes

Race war new level: new black

is orange alt-right.

Benny

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Haiku: purple heart

Is my purple heart

Badge of shame in age of fraud?

Last trump for the dead.

Benny

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Parody on Blake’s poem: O Rose!

 

O Drone you are down!

Like albatross You



Are shot down the sky-



In the silent hour

Hell keeps no account 



Of shame and glee:



When fools walk around flee

-

O Drone you are down!

Benny

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Shadow Play- 1.0 – “This soul thing”- Inferno

Stroll down the colonnade of life, mosaic
Of days lend youth its Byzantine color;
But my soul would loath it as life prosaic. 12

Thus assail’d by doubts and misspent choler
Of youth as ashes when fire has died out
Of his blood, and leave nothing but pother: 15

By the midst o’ my woeful days I struck out
Past my depths, my route on impulse ringed
My soul might yet redeem entire past rout. 18

A walk simple into the woods where hope winged
Alternate with pitfalls along the ground
must give man pause, his purpose unhinged 21

Perhaps my soul would read my tracks and sound
Alarm or set escape route in case of need
Oh no! with my own will I come this round. 24

Long onslaught with Fates and Furies’ full rede
Did unravel much of my confusion,
And yet loath I was let my soul aside. 27

Benny

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Just one point: internal truth

In a quatrain two ideas are set,- each line having 10 syllables and it follows a rhyme sequence. Poetic conventions are like a bowl into which ideas parallel or antithetical are poured. It has internal truth.
For example here we have a well known quatrain of Omar Khayyam:

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste-
The stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing-Oh, make haste!

Idea of life a journey setting up camp during the harsh day and the idea of breaking it up when coolness of the evening sets in, are all too familiar for the desert dwellers. These two familiar halves are part of human condition but what they recall to mind is the transience of it.

Two ideas complement one another and lead the reader to understand where their juxtaposition is leading to. The quatrain has internal logic or truth. Their familiar circumstances lead us to truth, meaning that the ideas transcend themselves to accept transience of life as true.

Internal truth speaks only for art and literature of man. Now let us discuss this from another literary genre, the world of fairy tales. Remember the gratuitous line almost without exception tacked at the end of a story, ‘and they lived happily ever after’? The heroine in the Frog Prince by kissing the hapless prince under a curse sets him free and they are married. Happily ever after? In reality the prince after decades of married life could prove to be an oaf but then a fairy tale like The Frog Prince is concerned with internal truth and nothing else. Truth of their marriage had Leo Tolstoy treated would be run on similar lines as Anna Karenina.

(This is a companion piece to God of Small sensations)
Benny

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A Walk to the Park

A walk to the park
in a drizzle unhurried,
Oh, the heave about my throat
is gone.
And the asphalt gleams with desire-
My feet may slosh through
A puddle or two,-never mind
But autumn is at my feet:
The greens are gold and
Red flushed with fleeting clouds
Overhead.
Intimations
Of winter tousle my hair
Even as geese glides to their tryst,
Silent before a world gone to sleep.
Benny

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On A Carousal

Where shall my excess baggage go
When death sends my spirit as such
On a carousal beyond farthest reach?

My spirit has its sphinx-like riddle:
Never shall my lips tattletale carry,
My soul shall have his will.

No matter something of vision I leave
placid lakes mirror rolling face of heaven
It is as though I have come unbidden;

Well seek not where wind blows leaves
Plucked out of its nest by violence:
Consider it as though in remembrance
Done for one for whom death came by chance.

Benny

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