Revisitation

When you write poetry as I have been doing intermittently since the age of seven, it is easy to get caught up in the moment of completion - when you determine that the poem is done, finished. However, it is often illuminating to reconsider poems you wrote months, years or even decades before - to see them anew. It can be like reviewing somebody else's poetry.

Over the years, I have posted numerous self-crafted poems here at "Yorkshire  Pudding".  I have tended to title such blogposts "Poem" in order to facilitate my own future searches. However, that is not always the case and back in December 2018 I shared an environmental poem I had written called "Once" under that blogpost title.

I guess that countless poems concerning Nature, the environment and anxiety about our planet's future have been produced in the last decade. It's hard to say anything new or original on the topic.

Most of us feel the pain of what is going on out there and we feel rather helpless. It is as if we are standing here watching creatures disappear, witnessing rising sea levels, desertification and the depletion of forests. What can we do? Well at the very least we can write a poem and thereby share feelings, release emotional pressure. As in World War One, great tragedy is invariably an effective melting pot for poetry.

I am proud of "Once" and its simple underlying message, delivered as though in a state of future naivete. I admit that it owes something to a song written by the folk singer Tom Paxton in 1970: "Whose Garden Was This?"

Whose garden was this? It must have been lovely

Did it have flowers? I've seen pictures of flowers

And I'd love to have smelled one

That's a song that resonated with me from the first time I heard it.

So yes, here's "Once" once again and quite unusually at this present point in time, I would not wish to change a thing...

⦿

Once

Once there were tigers
Padding through shadows
Anticipating another kill
They were quiet
But you could sense
Their presence
Watching. Breathing.
Or lapping furtively
From jungle streams.

Once there were hedgehogs
Snuffling in soil
Or scurrying homeward.
Living quietly
They preferred the night
Yet were amongst us
Feeding on worms
Rolling into needle balls
When danger called.

Once albatrosses
Rode on invisible winds
Circling the globe
Seeking squid or sprats
Gliding over oceans
That furrowed white below.
It is reported that
The very last pair
Danced on camera
Beaks raised to southern skies
Emitting melancholic cries
Like dodos.

⦿

Back in December 2018, I received this reassuring comment on "Once" from Bonnie who lives near Kansas City in Missouri:-

"Beautiful poem and very sad because of the truthfulness of it. Sometimes I will see a deer or other wild animal in a populated area looking panicked and lost. It breaks my heart that we have so encroached on their homes."

I say "reassuring" because Bonnie's honest emotional response proved that my main poetic intention had been achieved.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/2z6xYJw