This
week’s theme is ‘Tragic or Comedic’(note the choice of conjunction), which I’m
taking to mean (given the lack of an ‘and’) that I’m allowed to write something
that is either tragic or comedic – and that I most definitely don’t need to
write something that is both. So, as the dark and depressing seems to flow more
naturally from my fingertips than anything with humorous value, I’ve decided to
opt for the tragic...
People love disaster, if it does not touch them too nearly – as we run to see a burning house or a motor crash – and also it gives occasion for passionate speech; it is a vehicle for the poetry. 1
The
Four Stages of a Modern Tragedy
One
half of the motorway is closed,
the
other half has been brought to a crawl –
by
our need to see past the smoke; swirling blue lights;
crumpled
metal objects, like the devoured carcass of a wildebeest.
They
watch, stretching their necks through turned down windows,
dropping
their mouths in awe and disbelief: primal instinct taking hold
as
phones are sent out into the night
to
record the scene and preserve it in pixels.
Within
minutes, the videos are uploaded to YouTube.
Facebook
newsfeeds full of links tempt us, wave tragedy
beneath
our noses like sweet, freshly-spun candyfloss – and we bite,
lick
our lips and wipe the guilt from our mouths.
Millions
of hits from a single crash, and somehow we forget –
lose
ourselves in the blurred blue smoke.
Unable
to count on our fingers: to add, calculate –
we
forget that tragedy involves subtraction.
Thank you for
reading,
Lar
Lar
1 Jeffers, “Poetry, Gongorism and a
Thousand Years” from Twentieth-Century
American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, ed. Gioia, Mason, Schoerke
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), p.88