What Are the Uses of Anger?

 

It heats you, keeps you wam. 

It gets your house clean very fast.

It can chop a whole pile of wood.

If you take it for a run,

you’ll really feel those feet

hitting the pavement hard.

You’ll probably lose weight.

It can make you braver

than you ever thought you were,

or anyone else thought.

It can help you speak up,

for yourself or another,

in the face of injustice.

Spitting into that face.

Or it may turn you cold. This

will have you think clearly

and speak well.

Once, icily articulate,

it helped me stop a date-raper

bigger and stronger than me,

with only words.

Once, in white-hot rage,

it fired a banishing spell.

Her abuser left the country.

And anger can create

fierce poems – not this one, this

is merely about anger –

blazing to the sky.

Written for Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #182: Anger As (healthy) Fuel.

The Secret Truth of Old Age

 

I’m very occupied.

Honestly.

How?

Telling that 

needs greater honesty.

Almost unknown to myself

I decided:

The time left – mine! –

I choose to use

indulgently.

Once

I did the needful things.

Now I laze about,

reading, eating …

occupied in selfish pleasure

if I’m honest.

Written for dVerse Quadrille #226 – Honestly!

(A dVerse invention, the Quadrille must be exactly 44 words, excluding title, and must include one specific word – in this case, 'honest'.)

The View from Here

I walk out my door

and look straight across at mountains

jutting behind the houses over the road.

Really, they loom

on the other side of our town, and beyond

paddocks and canefields, trees and river.

But this hill I’m on, 

up the top here, takes my sight leaping

past the valley to the craggy range 

(the Border Ranges)

filling the width of my vision, which rises

to encompass also the height of the sky.

‘The bright of the sky’

my hand types, and I nearly keep that.

At present it’s clear, cold winter-bright.

The mountain edge 

is sharp, as if carved with a knife. 

Below is a row of trees topping the hill.

Somewhere else

the globe is warming, ice caps melt,

the ocean is filling with plastic.

Some other time,

not now, the rivers fill too full 

drowning the land; or forests burn.

For a moment I forget 

the horrors of wars, starvation, pestilence.

They will return too soon.  Meanwhile

I open my door.

I gaze at the mountains opposite, deepest blue. 

(I dribble a little, being old. It doesn’t matter.)

Written for Poetics: A View of One's Own, at dVerse.