The Old Stoic’s Lethargy

POEM FOR THE YEAR

(with apologies to W. H. Auden)

This earth in 2023

Is not the planet fit for me,

A world, I need, to give me hope

Opposed to the end of a rope.

***

My Eden landscapes and their climes

Are great constructs from rational times,

When reason meant, at least, induction,

Not dogma posed as deduction.

***

The plastic bags we gather to be

Transformed as if by alchemy:

I chose to send them whence they came,

The ground, from fossil fuels by name.

***

I’m now required to approve

Blighted wind farms that rarely move:

And even less reverence-commanding

Endless seas, useless notwithstanding.

***

Ghosts that I thought had been routed,

Their spent ideas revealed and doubted:

Ridiculousness now forgotten,

None knowing all is misbegotten.

***

Before the injustice of the blind,

It was important to be kind:

Totalitarian democracy

Lives in the dread realm of the Me.

***

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” we knew,

“The Trial,” “Waste Land”, “Animal Farm” too:

I cannot settle which is worse,

The modern novel, or free verse.

***

When couples played or sang duets,

Unwise the man immersed in debts

Or the nation well beyond its means,

Its souls now reduced to pork and beans.

***

Do we venerate, as a joint success

The silencing to which we acquiesce:

Thugs piling-on, and gleefully;

When did we scare so easily?

***

Hobgoblins abound; we do abide,

Yet we turn and we run and hide:

In the wake of the mightiest shout

Coming from the silliest lout.

***

How this world does clack its tongue,

How listlessly it strikes the young:

How can they hope to ever live free

When blinkered in its history?

***

The recent plague has made us fools

And given birth to glaikit rules:

Although it let us seek anew

Amongst our friends, those who proved true.

***

An old curmudgeon? I may be,

But remain of the citizenry:

In Stoicism I will base my trust,

And follow Zeno, as needs must.