Jack Pelham

Question to self:

What all would I do—
What all could I get done—
If I were the sort
Who found no necessary task distasteful,
And enjoyed them all enthusiastically?

Wouldn’t it be ironic
If He were exceedingly brilliant,
And we were so dull—
So extraordinarily dull
And incurious
And lethargic—
As not to perceive it?

I ran across this meme yesterday, and thought I’d have some fun with all the possible interpretations I could imagine.

It is the fashion of some,
When discoursing
On matters of religion,
To wax poetic
And pompous
And profuse,
As if the facts of the matter
Were insufficient
And needed help.

Anytime you say anything,
Do you say everything?

If not, then why do you
Take what I said
As if that were
The whole of my position
On the entirety of
Everything in existence—
As if my silence at the moment
On other matters
Were an indictment against them?

The older I get,
The more I understand that
The greatest aspiration
A person could possibly have
Is not any of the things
So many of us might think it is
At various times in our lives.

It is not the aspiration to
Fame or fortune,
Power or popularity,
Leadership or success,
Or to be
Unique or unpredictable.

We all deal with life’s daily troubles, frequently without giving them a second thought. They are common place to us—the bills, the squabbles, the sicknesses. When these things happen, provided we still find them manageable, we don’t often switch into panic mode, but take a calmer approach to getting through it.

When really tragic things happen, however, we can lose our minds and behave as if this world were supposed to trouble-free after all. This latest school shooting incident is a good example, as school shootings normally are.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to anyone
That good writing takes good time.

What may surprise many, however, is
That good thinking takes good time, too—

Out in the wild,
Where no self-respecting city
Would want to live—
Where man seems the intruder,
And all his noise a sin—

One can discover—
If he has learned to quiet his soul
And sink himself into the grass—
That the Earth
Has something to say.

As it happens, some of us,
On our way through this life
Will work the great puzzles of this world,
And some will not.