Poem of the Month - February 2010

After writing my last post requesting bad poems, I am naturally a little nervous  about posting my own poetry in case it should, like a rabid dog, come back to bite me. But poems have to be fearless if they are to be anything at all, so I will proceed.

Keats said 'Let a poem come easily, or let it not come at all'. Ishmael Reed said 'Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination' So what is it - easy or hard?  Sometimes I find it easy - words fly from my imagination onto the keyboard and lines, whole stanzas appearing before me before I have brought them to consciousness. These poems usually speak to me and tell me something I didn't know before, and I usually like them. Sure, I might tweak them a bit to make them more elegant, but these are the robes of decency that surround and make more palatable the intense child of my inner workings.

At other times, I sit with an idea for a long time, it doesn't want to take shape, I will it into being. I might even do some research, as in the poem of the month for February. These poems may be more skilled and 'clever', I am proud of them but I find it more difficult to think of them as truly mine, rather I am a conduit for a wider conscience.

So here is one after the words of Reed, rather than Keats - one that was researched, brought about by the will to be seen as a serious poet rather than a natural one. I am surprised that I wrote it nearly seven years ago.

Branded Ethics

White-coated laboratory men,
determined not to be fobbed off
by human complexity,
or the female domain
labour to reproduce.

Fathers of parthenogenesis
herald the new virgin birth,
learning, from the lower species,
the art of immaculate conception.
No longer a passing fad;
now it’s master-minded.

A head of plucked baby teeth
produce a trillion identical twins.
Deaf, mute, blind, short-lived
but, it’s a beginning.

Even answering the Big Questions
is within the reach of the men from Stemron.
They have endowed their babies with souls.
Elohim’s disciples claim their baby clones
are proof of life in the somewhere else.

In Milan, multiple sclerotic mice show promise,
And the future’s bright for gay couples.
Soon we will know if Elvis lives,
The future for the Tassie tiger,
Who will own the first army of elite warriors,
Where the first Clone Olympics will be held
and if we really did descend from aliens.

May 2003