(reclamation)

Hard day's night waits/ For the last flight out/ Free beer fails/ To stir the soul/  (as it used to)/ Bemused I look around for/  Amusement/ (the soul's drug of easy resort)/ I spy! I spy!/ Sparrows! A troika no less!!/ In this anodyne plastic wasteland!!/ Could it be a fey designer's/ Half-wit touch?/ Or possibly/ (oh stirring thought!)/ Nature reclaiming,/ Inch by slow inch,/ Her own

The Poetry of Ted Hughes

I discovered Ted Hughes when I was trying to cope with difficult times. I loved Ted Hughes then because the poetry of Ted Hughes takes on grief and transforms it into a healer’s vision.
Ted Hughes was England’s Poet Laureate until he passed away in 1998.
Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 called Ted Hughes a voice that was simply “longer and deeper and rougher” than those of his contemporaries.
Today I find in Hughes’s poetry a universal vision transformed by a startling yet rooted perspective. In his poem, reproduced below, titled “The River” from the 1983 collection of poems titled “River”, every Indian will recognize the mythos of the holy river so much a part of Indian culture transformed by an empathy that sunders aside metaphors to grasp the cruel truth of Nature.

The River

Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on
Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils,
It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god.

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Let There Be Light

I have always believed in the power of poetry.
The power to evoke ourselves to ourselves.
The power to build brands.
That's why all practioners of the art of the brand must try and practice the art of poetry.
Here is an effort of mine.

LIGHT
The unfurling of meaning cannot just be
A glissade of energy.
It is of course what meets our eager eye
That first gazes at this world.
But is it what exists between whatever exists,
Molecues, electrons, quarks, strings?
Less up in the air, so to speak,
Is it what informs the organs inside us?
Before the surgeon;s knife
Or gods forbid the assassin's bullet?
Let's cut, if we may, a little deeper. Ha ha!
Is it what gazes on nothingness
To create space?
As yesterday, the dance of the motes
In the afternoon of my gloom
Created hope