The post about the Gimmal a few days ago seems to have passed relatively unnoticed. Please have a look. If not duly recognized as an important discovery for poets and scholars, it should at least serve as a good treadmill for those with shortening attention spans.
For this week’s “Tuesday Poem,” here’s the closest your Zireaux has ever come to a “political” poem:
School Play (Post 4/20)
Inside the little crystal screen
that some inspired father’s fist
has raised before our craning row,
a blue-cheeked girl, with wavy bow
and foamy fins, stands stunned amidst
her ocean friends, all aquamarine.
A play of fish. A school of kids.
They’re singing of the seas:
“Don’t keep the smaller catches! Or
dispose of soap too close to shore!
We’re sure to catch a dread disease
by doing things the earth forbids!
We drown within your trawling snares!
Your petrol stings our sting-rays’ eyes!”
They’re dressed as star-fish, urchins, jellies
tentacled with bulging bellies.
But one blue girl, reduced in size,
is fixed within that floating glare.
“Your plastics soil our seaweed beds!
Your sonar bursts our gentle ears!
You may not see the loss until
its absence shows itself…” — but still
the father’s upraised camera spears
the spume of stage-lights overhead.
It zooms, that SonyCam, it drills
with driving force and trembling aim,
into the children’s depths, to trap
those lovely liquid eyes, to tap
within its tiny fold-out frame
the fount where every passion spills.
Zireaux
July 1, 2010
Takapuna, New Zealand
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I rather like this poem’s more political tone of addressing some of the environmental damage being done…thanks for sharing it.
thanks – this was cool too. But then I have a soft spot for school plays
and the ocean.