• About
  • Artists and Creatives
  • Cool Capitalists
  • Not-for-profits
  • Rody’s songs
    • DSS Blues
    • Mother Courage
    • Shadows in a Landscape
    • Sonnet 18
  • Social Pages

Universal Stranger

~ on Alienation, Being and Belonging

Universal Stranger

Monthly Archives: July 2017

Notes for a poem, “Black”; by Simon Jones

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by Simon Jones in Deep and Meaningful

≈ Comments Off on Notes for a poem, “Black”; by Simon Jones

(Notes for a poem)

Black

‘Stick to the bitumen and you’ll be right.’

 

Black ribbon road

Laid down by some Ariadne of the outback

Through the red dust

(Ancient fire, consumed to powder

By its own heat)

 

Inscribed like black letter law;

Reminds me of Moses in the desert―

O children of Israel!

black-ribbon-road

Takes me back

To my childhood

Land of my fathers

Wanderers in a deforested landscape

‘Pilgrim through this barren land’

 

(Should I start singing Bread of Heaven?)

 

The burning bush

Burns without consuming:

I am.

 

The howling dingo emptiness behind me

Always at my heels

Chasing my wheels.

 

God is an abstraction

Anthropomorphic attributions are idolatrous

 

But necessary

Because redemption is the human and the abstract (or divine)

Partaking of each other’s nature.

 

Prophets are inspired

A means to salvation by virtue of being human mediators of the divine (or abstract)

A variation on anthropomorphism.

 

Who is your prophet, O lost tribe of Israel?

(For so the Welsh were thought to be.)

 

“Speaking for myself, it was my Great Uncle Tom,

Or Rhondda Tom (as he wasn’t known; I just made that up).

The pinnacle of manliness in my family―

Teacher, politician, social activist―

In whom faith and scepticism wrestled,

Each making the other stronger;

 

Engaged

In the issues of the day.”

 

The black economy;

Faces black with coal dust,

Their words hung black and biblical on the air, in their own ink of sound

And fell into print

Black letters

Fingers black with ink.

3-generations-of-welsh-miners-eugene-smith

Tom inspired my father

My father became a journalist

 

A matter of record now

The echoes have died

But not

The fire in their eyes or on their tongues

 

The flames still dance in the darkness

 

Like the sunset up ahead

At the end of this long black road

Out of nowhere

 

(Painting: Three Generations of Welsh Miners, by Eugene Smith)

Recent Posts

  • Stretching My Legs: a Dog, the Dead, and a Mad-Looking Librarian
  • The Queen, the Prime Minister and the Rise of Woke
  • Triumph of the spirit: Jeff Cotton’s 52 years of healing
  • Better late than never: the Stranger ‘clarifies’ his thinking
  • The Stranger cops it sweet

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • November 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • June 2022
    • June 2021
    • April 2021
    • February 2021
    • August 2020
    • March 2020
    • October 2019
    • August 2019
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • May 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • January 2017
    • October 2016
    • May 2016
    • December 2015
    • July 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • January 2015
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014

    Categories

    • Correspondence
    • Deep and Meaningful
    • Festivals
    • He Ain't Heavy
    • Heritage
    • International
    • Local
    • Metro
    • Music
    • National
    • News
    • Saturday Sports Special

    Links

    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • YouTube

    Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.