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The Truck Driver Poet: Three Poems
by C.L. Guthrie
John R. Guthrie
Full disclosure: The poet was also
my father. Clarence Luther Guthrie, Sr. He was born on a frosty and windswept
day on
Examples of this blue collar poet’s work are below:
The Never Ebbing Tide
1. The
Prayer
Dear Lord, I see this weary world
With human cargo fraught,
A pygmy world of pygmy men
With trains of pygmy though.
Futility lays hold on me,
In vain we’ve toiled and fought,
In vain we’ve spilled our heroes’ blood,
In vain our victories wrought.
How long, how long, Oh Lord, must
we
Await the promised day
When the lamb shall lie in perfect peace –
Nor fear the beasts of prey?
2. The
answer
I fashioned man deep of
my thought;
From nothingness the spheres;
I’ll work my will upon this earth
If it takes ten
thousand years.
Time weighs not heavy on my hands,
Time is a boundless sea.
An aeon is
but a passing hour
Spaced in
infinity.
My will’s a never ebbing tide
Unchanged by smiles and tears;
I’ll work my purpose hear with man
If it takes ten
million years.
When I began the race of man,
My purpose I decreed,
Nor shall his pulsing, erring
thoughts
My moveless
plan impede.
There is an upward sweep, divine,
A universal swell,
That lifts man on the crest of time
To heights no tongue can tell.
Man’s destiny is as the stars,
And there at last shall he,
Through halting steps, through
vaulting faith,
Achieve that destiny.
§
PARADOX
Of all like’s inconsistencies
This one I most decry:
Men seal the prophet’s burning lips,
Then bid him prophesy.
§
The Money Changers
The tricksters, driven from the temple, soon returned
And bought it with their wealth of
gold.
They bought if from without and from within,
And captive Christ at mammon’s booth is sold.
Their preacher offers solace in the end,
To all content to be a slave.
The verities of life are taught and thin—
Their preacher offers peace – beyond the grave.
“The poor you have with you, and always must –
The rich are very good, and very just ---
The meek shall own the earth – when they are dust;
And it’s no sin for those of means to lust.”
Indeed, the Lord may be in such a den,
But weeping for the erring sons of
men.
§
Dr. John R. Guthrie practiced family medicine in the
With
appreciation to first publisher, HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY
............................................................................................................................................................
The Machine Gunner’s Poet:
Charles Baudelaire’s Tout
Entière
and The Albatross
By John R. Guthrie
Full four decades and more ago, I was that most earnest of creatures, a
Lance Corporal of Marines, 19 years old, incredibly skinny, and the leader of a
machine gun section in the landing force of a gunboat called USS Little Rock.
We’d just returned from the revolution in the Caribbean that followed the
assassination of the infamous yet ever colorful Dominican despot, Generalissimo
Rafael Leonídas Trujillo, (El Jefe as he was called
publicly, or very privately, Chapitas, "bottlecaps" --
because of his plethora of medals and, equally descriptively, El Chivas, “The goat” because of his
sexual proclivities).
Once the imbroglio in
There was a display of small, thin books published under the imprint of
the Peter Pauper Press, all priced so as to be within that lance
corporal’s budget. The book I picked up had, certainly for a young man of very
modest educational accomplishment from rural
In short, there were words of such power and beauty as to convey to him
that there were kingdoms and castles, there were powers and principalities, far
beyond those that he’d previously entertained or even thought possible. With
all due appreciation for the stepping stone the United States Marine Corps
provided for me, the book cracked open the door to a very different world than
either the one in which I was residing or the one from which I’d sprung. And
when I peeked into that world, against all odds, I saw myself someday, somehow,
as part of it.
Baudelaire, to refresh the reader’s memory, was born in 1821. In our
times, he would run a very good risk of being institutionalized—perhaps in
prison for his opium addiction, perhaps in a mental institution on heavy doses
of antipsychotics because of the chaos of his inner
life.
He had a mistress, Jean Duvall, with whom he was totally, madly
obsessed. She’s often charitably described as being “an actress,” and a
“lesbian.” In fact, you might more accurately describe her as a member of a
much older profession and polymorphously perverse in
her sexual orientation. Better, think of her as being that person you met as an
undergraduate on that lost weekend in Myrtle Beach or Fort Lauderdale, Nassau
or Acapulco and came back to your sane
and ordered life, wondered whether you should get tested for something, hoped
for the best, and tried to forget that it ever happened.
Baudelaire, to the abject horror of his very aristocratic mother, clung
fast to Jean Duval his whole life through. Below is one of the milder erotic
poems he wrote of his love for that dreadfully flawed woman. Perhaps you can
hear resonating through it still 150 years later, the intensity of his
affection for her:
Tout Entière
The Devil up my attic stair
Came tiptoeing a while ago
And, trying to catch me unaware,
Said laughing, “I should like to know,
“Of all her many charms, what springs
Most often to your mind? Of all
The rose-colored and shadowy things
Whereby her beauty may enthrall,
“Which is the sweetest?” –O my soul,
I answered the abhorrèd Guest:
Her beauty is complete and whole.
No single part is loveliest,
“When she is near, I cannot say
What gives me such intense delight,
She dazzles like the break of day,
She comforts like the fall of night,
”My senses seem to merge in one,
The harmony that rules her being
Is all my knowledge – I have none
Of hearing, smelling, touching,
seeing.
“No, I cannot make a choice
In this sublime bewilderment.
Perhaps the music of her scent!
Perhaps the perfume of her voice!
I hope Jean Duval was as impressed by the brilliance of Baudelaire’s
metaphor and the poetry of his imagination as was I.
My favorite of Baudelaire’s poems, though, from that very first day when
I picked up that small volume, was and still is “The Albatross.” Now remember,
I was a seagoing Marine. How could I not be intrigued by a poem named
for those magnificent creatures one might see from time to time gliding so effortlessly high above the ship as you stood the gun
watch in one distant place or another?
But in lieu of my telling you about this pivotal poem and my reaction to
it, allow me to include it and you decide if it works at any level for you:
The Albatross
Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
Lure upon the deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
Flying in slow and elegant circles
above the mast.
No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.
How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and
weak –
He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his
beak;
Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.
The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings:
Til exiled on earth, at bay amid the
jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.
The above poems are
taken from a 1936 volume in my library which the inimitable Edna St. Vincent Millay and her cotranslator
George Dillon undertook the tricky business of translating Les Fleurs du Mal so that it
worked as well in English as it did in French. I favor their translations
because they adhere to the original Alexandrines, or six beat lines typical of
French poetry instead of shifting to the iambic pentameter more common in
English. Also, the original French poem and the translation are on facing pages
for comparison.
So there you have
him; Charles Baudelaire. His personal life was an ongoing tragedy. According to
some, in fact just about everyone that mattered, he was an immoral person --
his works were banned by church and state early on for
their blasphemous and sexual content. He was improvident. He was comatose and
blind from neurosyphillis when he died in poverty at
the age of 46. But for all that he was not, Charles Baudelaire was a Poet. And
what a Poet!
--End--
Gawaine Caldwater
Ross of
The Holyday
Gawaine Caldwater Ross
Through the
rays of holy light
I ambled in
the forest green,
Filtering
through the morning mist
The sound of distant water falling.
Deer leapt
off across the ferns,
Cedar trees
some ten feet thick
Lay across
steep wet ravines.
I was
treading on the sacred ground
Of Eartha and her swelling mounds:
Oh She was fully sexed that day.
In my mind
I walked with Embla
The very
first woman, born of an elm,
And I was
Ask, the mighty ash
Thick and tall and proud and strong.
We stepped
across the
And found a
soft place in the grass
For rooting in the summer sun.
She was
human, and yet more,
Someone to love, and to adore.
No open
space beneath a dome
Of church
or mosque or synagogue
Can ever
claim to be as pure
As the
mountain sky so high and blue
We inhaled
as we drifted through
The heartscape
of our lives inweaving.
The
Chickasaw
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