Hilton Head Island: too close to home; two poems

 I am rereading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA.  The copyright is dated 1988 and I read it for the first time about then.  It begins with the death of an aristocratic doctor, Juvenal Urbino, who in his old age has become decrepit.  His mind and body are failing.  He is aware of this.  His wife has to help him dress.  His memory is unreliable, so he writes notes and then doesn’t understand what the notes are about.  He dies falling from a ladder trying to recapture an escaped pet parrot.  We are told that at the time of his death he was eighty-one years old.  When I read that I paused.  I am eighty-one years old.  After a few minutes I decided that there is eighty-one and there is eighty-one and went and did my age in push-ups and then wrote this.

The Western poetry I am now reading is in THE SEASHELL ANTHOLOGY OF GREAT POETRY.  The Asian is CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY.  I have read both before.  Perhaps oddly I feel closer to the ancient Chinese hermit poets living alone in their mountains than I do to many of the Western poets, but then there are women.  I am more complicated than the average bear.

One section of THE SEASHELL ANTHOLOGY is titled ‘Arms and the Boy’ which you may recognize as a variation on George Bernard Shaw’s play, ARMS AND THE MAN.  It is also the title of a poem by Wilfred Owen who died in a meaningless attack in the last week of WW1.  Most of those killed in wars are boys, not men, and now with women’s deserved equality we send women into combat to be killed and maimed too.  Clearly progress.

All the poems in ‘Arms and the Boy’ are good.  Many from what we now call World War 1 excellent and to me familiar.

Here are two more from ‘Arms and the Boy’ which I did not know and admire.  One of the deepest pleasures of my life is coming across new to me great words.