New Poetry

Believe it or not, despite all the painting and busy time I still have a few moments to complete some new poetry. It is part of the book I am working on entitled "The Poetry Diet" and of course it is all fat free!

A FEAST OF FORESTS

The men eat the forests
mouths grinding with chainsaws
until centuries of tree life become mythology,
furniture and building supplies.

In a small apartment or spacious house
our future is consumed, traded on present comforts
supply and demand
and the consistent abuse is spoken as a
casual conversation around an oak dining room table.

Art Update

Here are a couple of recently completed works. "Angel" and

"Lost in Steak."

Commemoration for August 9, 1945

Three days after the Enola Gay and her crew dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima, another bomb "Fat Man" was unleashed on the city of Nagasaki.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (visit http://ohst.berkeley.edu/oppenheimer/exhibit/ was head of the project that developed the bomb.

This is a poem I wrote about him.

THE LONELIEST MAN IN THE WORLD

"I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
his words, read from the Gita, reaching out through the newsreels as
his work reached out to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How could he have lived after,
enjoyed one moment,
one single minute of peace
the isotope of his life decaying predictably
as he moved towards this sin
with help from others
some who survived to stoke cold war fires
thinking God, three-person or otherwise, was a no brainer
and Robert, mind filled with brilliance and disease
a sickness that steals your reality
for him it wouldn’t hurt to be brain compartmentalized
arrogant, quirky Einstein countenance
no belief in luck, only assigned value
quantum acceptance, without social reaction or interactions
neither positive nor negative
the poor little rich kid with a beautiful mind
teaching himself Sanskrit and reading Dante in Italian
to fill the gaps of lonely in Los Alamos
had no understanding of the relations of man to his society,
was just a trace particle ripping through time space
on a ride along with Fermi, Toynbee, Rutherford and Bohr.

I always wondered about you Robert, wan and slight at the rudder of your little sailboat
chasing a summer squall across a small lake
just a kid trying to make your parents look,
a boy locked naked in the icehouse
pondering the penetrating power of poetry and electrons
without being able to figure out how to fit in the human social environment.
You remind me of myself, I hope I don’t learn to blow anything up.

Note: Nobel Prize winning Physicist, Paul Dirac, a friend to Oppenheimer and one who also studied poetry, was moved to say "In physics we try to tell people things in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry it's the exact opposite" (Goodchild, 1980, p.21) People have asked why I would write about a non-Canadian scientist and I tell them that what he participated in affected the entire world, including Canada, also it is interesting to note that Canada sold both the British and Americans Uranium for their atomic bomb experiments, from Eldorado, a private radium-mining company headquartered in Port Hope, Ontario.

Works Cited:
Goodchild, Peter. J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Shatterer of Worlds". London, England: BBC, 1980.

Remembering Hiroshima

I think we can best commemorate this anniversary ( 62 years hence today) by watching this video featuring OMD's song "Enola Gay". This posting is intended as a memorial for this date and all those in Japan who died.