Fear Of Darkness

Prose Often Bumbles And Stumbles Along

Prose often bumbles and stumbles along,

Whilst poetry’s music thermals on air.

One learns to fly and soon the wings are strong

And then one sails along without a care.

A poet’s writing may be quite abstruse

And you can ask why he created,

It may be criticism of abuse,

Expressed as a catharsis that’s abated.

The poet trusts the instincts of his soul

And learns from what he writes and then he shares

With past and present futures as his goal

And then reveals the truth, as essence bares.

The poet marvels at what he has done;

He lives up with the stars, when he has won.

© Joe Lake (First published in Songs Of Poetry)

Winnebago, Julie ponders her fate by thinking about the events of the last few days here at Cooee beach in Tasmania.

She felt curiously elated, overjoyed, even. She took a deep breath and then closed her eyes as she saw herself floating off the bed and hovering where she contemplated a lightness and freedom she had never felt before. Next, her body began to expand and soon encompassed the caravan and the suburb of Cooee and the beach and the abattoir that was next to the camping area. Then she kept growing until she felt the whole town of Burnie being part of hers. Bigger and bigger she grew until she encompassed within herself the whole of Tasmania which she contemplated with a kind of benevolent affection. She continued to grow and soon she felt within herself the Earth and then the moon and bigger and bigger as she took in the solar system where she halted for a moment, contemplating the distant Earth and its puny inhabitants as she felt compassion and concern for their tiny and irrelevant problems on this speck in the solar system. After she sent a feeling of love and compassion to the inhabitants of the Earth, she kept on expanding and soon engulfed the whole of the universe inside herself as all her personal problems and limitations melted away in awe of this magnificent creation.

She contemplated the vastness and the impossibility of worrying about her own pettiness, considering the myriads of stars and moons that were in her grasp and her responsibility before which she felt incompetent. It was like a Napoleon who considers his army and realises it to be a thing in itself of which even he is but a servant of the whole and if armies have failed so can a person capitulate and eventually recuperate in a different form. This is what Julie felt within herself, a spark, the trigger to love the whole of humanity where one could attempt a change within oneself and so affect a change of the whole for the better and perhaps to survive adversity but the fact was that something had happened to them both that seemed completely beyond their understanding or control. The question of blessing or curse remained a muddle that she would have to escape from eventually, a course that would lead inevitably to destruction as the dinosaurs had their time and so would her experiences have an end.

(To be continued next month)