Count Your Blessings #52 – Poems and Poetry

I thought about leaving this post until tomorrow being Valentines day and all; but actually I’m not talking about the romantic type of poetry. The poetry I like is the type that paints a picture in your head that draws you to imagine.

Today someone pointed out a web site with lots of the type of poetry I really like. This type of poetry takes you out of yourself and shows you the bigger world and even beyond.

I suppose it must be fairly self evident as a blogger who mainly writes that I like words. I actually see words as a means to an end, I don’t love words because they are words, I love words because they have the potential to communicate something that takes me to somewhere else. I’m not talking about escaping, I’m talking about travelling and in travelling experiencing something new that broadens who I am.

The other thing that poems can do is to express something that we struggle to express ourselves. Last night one of the young guys in my Cell Group got baptised. In our church people who are getting baptised say a few words before-hand. It’s a daunting task to stand up in-front of a few hundred people and talk about yourself. So what does a young guy do – he reads a poem; it was great.

Anyway, here’s one that I really liked:

Performance for an Audience of One by Gerard Kelly

If you had been the only one:
Yours the only ticket sold;
Your solitary bottom
Spoilt for choice
In an ocean of empty seats.
If you had been
The only one:
He still would have staged
The whole show.

The brooding, hovering chords
Of the overture
Unfolding
For your ears only:
Stars spinning out like Catherine wheels
Across a dark but lightening set,
Until dawn was uncorked
On green home.

Act 1: the building of a nation:
A people wooed and won
And lost
And won again.
For you alone the whole cast
Weaving and turning through dances
To fill a joyous expanse of stage.

Act 2: the cry of a child
In a vastly empty universe;
The adventure of hope and betrayal;
The seat-gripping climate:
Triumph diving, death defying,
Through the fiery hoop of tragedy.
The clamour of the crowd scenes
Building
Toward an unimagined finale –
A cosmos, purged of guilt
Restored,
Dressed for dancing.

If you had been the only one,
Your grimy pounds
The total take:
He still would have staged
The whole show
And wept for joy
At the warmth
of your applause.