PAINTING BY ROY LICHTENSTEIN
FOR THE TEAR DRENCHED WORLD
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I would like to offer up these verses as food for thought. The poem ' Blood Feud 'deals with war & the ongoing problem of " Mans Inhumanity to man which makes countless thousands to weep & mourn " to borrow a line from Robert Burns.

Robert Burns was one of the first poets who got me interested in poetry & its possibilities. His poems included a number of themes on romantic love & other themes common to poetry but he also being influenced by the tradition of the Trubador he also wrote about political & social concerns as in A MAN's A MAN FOR A' THAT & A' THAT... the poor the peasant the rich & kings are all just part of humanity & shouldn't be judged according to wealth & status & in the poem MAN's INHUMANITY TO MAN is a lament of how terribly human beings treat one another for all their talk of Christian piety & love. These themes are also explored in his whimsical poems like TO A LOUSE in which lice will inhabit the hair of some great lady as they will the hair of the poorest. For his time such themes were rather radical. Over the years I have noticed that some of these more politically motivated poems are often left out of books of his poetry. People prefer to recite his poem for the Hagus & Auld Lang Syne & thereby taking away the more serious side of his poetry.

The poem below was originally meant to be dedicated to Robbie Burns on his birthday...



1. Blood Feud

The days have gone darker
soldiers doing their duty
nations & religions cultures clashing
bombers flying delivering death
buildings exploding bodies torn apart
just another rerun on the tv
we’ve been here before
sometimes in jungles
sometimes in deserts
sometimes in the streets of cities
like some foreign colony getting uppity
for some life is so cheap
send in the troops
they will fight
they will retaliate
beginning a new cycle
like in a pointless blood feud
a pissing contest
who’s faith is strongest
all for the sake of a name
which does the eternal one prefer
Yahweh Jehovah Jesus Allah
Buddha Vishnu Shiva Brahma
Krishna Ahura Mazda
god of a hundred thousand names
yet all souls are glimmering shimmering lights
a world of glittering jewels
we have turned it inside out
we are the barbarians
writing a requiem for an empire
the emperor has no clothes
an emperor over-confident
an emperor gone mad
turning the nation into a prison
hearing sad Hungarian folk music
some sad Jewish song
some sad Arabic poetry
all these poets muscians & artists slaving away
in the fields of the imagination
lost in visions of fantasy
coming up against the stone-walls of real-politic
someone says its like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic-

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