(untitled first draft)

[lnhammer]

As ranchers hold their spreads by riding them;
As teachers grow their students by their teaching,
Not what is taught; as gardeners learn from stem
And bud and bloom and root and leaf sun-reaching
What plants can make of them, and what they are;
As an astronomer expands by seeing
A fast old galaxy or new still star;
As rangers find that blazing trails is freeing;
As clowns behold the truth in the absurd;
As police hold the law, and lawyers take it;
As writers build a world inside each word;
As forgers make art even as they fake it;
As we can only be by what we do --
So let us make ourselves, and make us new.

—16 May 2009

I can safely call this the first thing I've written so completely influenced by Louis MacNeice. I'm not pleased with the regularity of the third quatrain, and while the order is correct for the argument, the rhetorical structure wants to swap writers and clowns -- logic and imagery should pull in tandem, darn it. Still, not bad for a lightly corrected first draft.

---L.

Comments

[ex_asakiyume313]

I found the line As forgers make art even as they fake it very affecting, I think because I think it's true and I am grateful to you for the hat-tip. ... and I've never been a forger, nor known one... I just like to see people who are dismissed and vilified have their moment in the sun, too.

[lnhammer]

The vilification they get is part of what makes me want to put clowns between lawyers and forgers -- but that changes the argument, deemphasizing the acts of creation. And shuffling to writers-forgers-clowns-police is just perverse. I think the only solution is to rip out the panel and stitch in something new.

That also has the forgers, of course, and the writers.

---L.

[ex_asakiyume313]

I'll await a new incarnation on an even-numbered day.