GOODBYE
If in the end humanity passes into the night
Believing itself
Unloved, Unmissed, and Unmourned,
The architect of its own destruction,
Seized by selfishness,
Then I wonder what the last cry
As the lights go down
On human history will be?
Perhaps “More grace! Just a little more grace!”
And perhaps a voice in the darkness will reply
“Let there be light”.
GOODBYE
This is a poem about justice and grace. Collectively, we are damaging our world and the consequences of this are both grave and ultimately indifferent to our survival. Too much abuse of the earth will result in environmental catastrophe as surely as day follows night. Actions have consequences. The fact that we love our kids, donate to charity, and look after our spouses, will mean nothing to science. At a certain point, a tipping point, the consequences will become irreversible (or at least result in a long-term shift that will take many lifetimes to repair) and whether we feel we deserve them or not, those consequences will apply indiscriminately. We need a miracle – a miracle in the form of a fundamental shift in human selfishness, or a miracle in the form of an old-fashioned intervention by the deity Himself. Pessimist that I am, I still hold out hope that we can find the humanity to act in time, and, if it is already too late, then, maybe we can find the humanity to support one another through the disasters to come. But either way, I hope for grace, a divine act of mercy in the face of our reckless collective selfishness.
TO SOMEONE I JUST MET
Wanting to be interesting
Succeeding only in being shy
Staring out of windows at work
Hoping you might be thinking of me too
Trembling at the brush of your
Jumper against my arm
Praying you’ll stop long enough
To find the value in me
That I look for in you
TO SOMEONE I HAVE JUST MET
I’ve been happily married for 20 years now. It’s easy to forget what it is like to be single (and wishing not to be). The uncertainty and the insecurity of wanting to find someone while hoping they, in turn, will find you.
MENU
Let’s try friendship for entree
And, if we enjoy the taste,
Try a double helping of love for first course.
Make the main course last a lifetime in the exchange of vows
And skip the dessert
Of recrimination, disappointment
And divorce.
MENU
Not one of my favorites. I cringe when I read this one. At the time I thought I was being clever, using a menu as a metaphor for choosing a life partner. Now, it just irritates me.
SHORT POEM
The cat sat on the mat
Thinking of a juicy rat.
With stomach swollen grossly fat,
He had himself a heart attack.
SHORT POEM
This was an experiment; an attempt to use the “The Cat Sat on the Mat” as a prompt for, as the title implies, a short poem. It was a piece of fun nonsense. And for those who want to hassle me about the final line; yes it rhymes the vowel and not the consonant, and yes, it’s deliberate, and yes, the rhythm is what drives this poem.
THE NEXT MOVE
Why not make the next move?
In a game of chess
It would be your turn.
THE NEXT MOVE
Being shy is hard. Watching girls in the corridor at high-school mocking uproariously because “guess who just asked me out?” was terrifying. My relative inexperience at courtship (and the reading of all its multitude of subtle signals) when added to my desperate desire to avoid becoming an object of ridicule, goes some way towards explaining why my teenage-self wanted to minimize the risk involved in courtship. The reality is, we are all desperately afraid that we will be rejected and engage in the dance of hint and counter-hint as our best strategy. In this sense, courtship is genuinely like a game and, if we could but see it, each player does in fact take their turn. But I was never a subtle game player and, for a very long time, I didn’t understand the rules. And once I did understand the rules, they had changed.
These poems are copyright © 1998 Philip Craig Robotham, all rights reserved
