Not A Day

This is not a day for poets:
Its endless, rythmless hours
Break over us in torrents;
Incoherent and dissonant.

Once only bleak letters
Brought the bad news from far away
Strung out in words alone, tidings,
Halting and plain, heartbroken.

Now clichés for every horror
Wring out the last drops of sorrow,
Slyly injecting outrage,
Like bloodstains into tears.

So many clichés now:
Words blot out the sun,
And their sound deadens the senses,
Like a ringing in the ears.

Poets merely witness, stunned into silence,
Falsehood spinning with deceivers' jargon,
Mouths brimful of calculated anger:
So much shrill, shrill pettiness.

Nor is it a day for nations:
The same interminable impasses
Bring no better news, more of the same
Jams the wiretaps of the world.

We trusted the plain paper stories,
Grey column inches, smearing ink.
Time distilled some truth in them,
Letter by metal letter.

Now the old certainties are gone,
Stripped by a hurricane of words:
For every misdeed a sentence,
A sentence for every lie we’re told.

Nation speaks nothing unto nation:
Their mails and messages, empty copy.
Verbiage is sense; we make a smokescreen
From the ashes of the truth.

Poets’ hands hang idle, useless,
Their rhyming journalism stifled,
Their song, clogged dust inside their throats
What should be spoken, choked at birth.

This is not a day for nation or poet.

© BH 2015

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My counterpoint to last week's National Poetry Day. Not in antagonism, rather a testament to the immense task before those of us who still believe the pen is mightier than the sword.

And this poem goes on writing, editing itself. A week later and the chiselling goes on. I'm looking, as sculptors do, for the shape inside the stone. Either that or I'm fiddling, like Nero, I suppose, while my city burns.