When I was a child I wanted to be JKRowling as an adult. Not a writer like JKRowling. Not a successful novelist but JK herself. It was my dearest ambition and life-plan to go back in time and thwack JK over the head before Harry ever entered into her head. I instead would write the books and viola! Instint fame, fortune and total adoration. Unfortunately I proved to be no scientist and all plans of time travel are currently on hold (although never say never).
Meanwhile my thoughts turn to writing again and to my current decision to focus my energies not on bending the space-time continum (I watch Heroes) but on soaking as much literature in as many forms as possible. Today I've been reading Kerouac's "spontaneous prose", On the Road, buying Aldous Huxley's LitCrit Brave New World...Revisited and discovering the simple tragedy of Ewart Alan Mackintosh's poetry. I'd like to share this poem with you all and leave you thoughts of how much a word can convey. They say a picture says a thousand words: I say codswallop.
So you were David’s father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.
Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting,
But just the sheep on the hill,
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year get stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.
You were only David’s father,
You were only David’s father,
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns,
And we came back at twilight
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.
Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers’,
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.
Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed “Don’t leave me, sir”,
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.
