Kingsbrae 21.3
21 June 2017
Wollemi Nobilis
To see you on this day,
the summer solstice,
when time and the sun
stand still,
is to recall you as relictus,
then to acclaim you
as Lazarus,
risen from the dead.
Your fossil footprints
walked for so long,
two hundred million years,
and you walked with them,
unknown, unrecognized,
lost in the wilderness.
What poverty in language:
we either describe you
in impossible scientific Latin
or else we reduce you
to a chocolate coco pops
breakfast cereal.
Hand-cuffed, chained,
your feet rooted within
this immobile crockery pot,
you will never leave us now.
You are your own solstice,
a stationary seed,
growing to adulthood,
sown in a circle
of never-ending time.
Comment: I have been trying since Sunday, 5 March 2017, to write this poem. But what are four months in the life of a seventy-three year old poet or a pine tree that was thought to have become extinct 200 million years ago. I do not have the words to express how I feel looking at this throwback to the time of the Dinosaurs. And maybe that is how this poem should start for it is, after all, Wordless Wednesday … “I do not have the words …” and thoughts, too, jam in the brain and refuse to cycle, let alone re-cycle. So, I’ll leave this poem for now. That said, I will probably come back to it. Meanwhile, do I ever feel so absolutely, totally, and completely inadequate.
Inadequate?!? Hardly! But I understand the feeling. There are things that are so awe-inspiring that it really is hard to grasp the words. Like there ought to be a ‘holy’ language that we don’t use in day to day speech, set aside to describe those kinds of things.
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Thank you, Ms. Meghan. Sometimes words work and sometimes e are faced with the inadequacy of our efforts to match the things we want to achieve. How do we work with 200 million years of absence? I just don’t know.
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That is daunting for sure!
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We all bump into something similar. The question, as creative artists, is how do we handle it? And that’s where our creativity comes in.
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Uniquely our best own.
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Now that’s a unique and neat way of putting it!
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Oops! I think I just typed too fast and auto correct filled that in!
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It happens … especially when I use Spanish or French … I always have to Moo-correct auto correct!
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