2008•03•20 ~ something for Stu
I know what you’re thinking. Enough with the Tibet and the Dalai Lama for god’s sake! Okay, I’ll leave it alone for a bit. I remain agitated by this, though. My thinking on China remains the same. This is a bad government -- a bunch of frightened little men, cowards. A dictatorship in control of 1.3 billion people. A travesty. Don’t get me started. Here’s today’s sorbet….
Three glasses of wine
(for Stu 1979 – 2008)
I get the news about you and immediately
remember you in my house the last time, spilling wine
three times in one evening, and how irritated I was – I mean,
nobody spills wine three times in one night! But you did, in a sort of
prescient botched Eucharist and it stuck with me.
Shame on me for being so shallow and stupid.
Wine glasses, new floors; these are just things, they are “stuff” – and
not important in the long run. Had you come over again,
I might have laughed and called you “spilly-boy,” while pouring you a glass,
and carried on, because some fundamental part of me knows spilt wine
is irrelevant. And maybe you wouldn’t have remembered the wine, and my wife
would have glared at me, rightly so, for being an ass, for trying to tease.
I might have been more concerned about you, Canadian soldier,
addict, troubled boyfriend of my niece.
At the bottom of the mess of drugs and dealing with wars,
and more, I’m certain, you were, just like the rest of us –
needing love, yearning to love.
While I always put out a welcoming hand to you,
I never sought you out. I never sought you out and asked how you were.
What good is that friendly hand, or a smiling face, without a follow-through?
These words cannot sum up a life and I did not take the time
to know you beyond a few conversations
and three spilt glasses of red.
But sometimes a death requires words – even failed ones
like these. Every time I spill wine, or I see wine spilt, on a table,
a floor, a counter top – I will remember you.
1 Comment
1. deb had this to say: Mar 21, 2008 ~ 07:54 ~ #
What a lovely, sad poem.
As for Tibet, there are no easy answers. China does what ever it wants to do. Why they would want Tibet is a good question. I imagine that somebody in the government thinks it has strategic importance and the best way to wipe out a culture and a people is to drown it in another culture and people.
Is it wrong? Yes. Will it stop. Doubtful. You’d think human beings would have evolved beyond this by now but we haven’t. Still ruled by our basic animal instincts such as territory, fear, and lust. Buddhists have the right idea and yet their very ideas, their religion and their culture leave them vulnerable to extermination.