I had planned on organising this week’s column around the fact that Friday 29 August is the sixth anniversary of Reddits Poetry, starting as usual in Café D’Vine, New Street, at 6 for 6.30pm.
I had planned on organising this week’s column around the fact that Friday 29 August is the sixth anniversary of Reddits Poetry, starting as usual in Café D’Vine, New Street, at 6 for 6.30pm.
Please come along and celebrate our birthday with us if you can. It’s an especially auspicious evening because it coincides with Rhodes University’s Gender Week, and participants at this month’s Reddits are invited – if they wish – to share poetry related to the theme of gender equality.
There is, of course, no compulsion in this, and I both hope and expect that we will enjoy the usual varied feast of poetry, spoken word and music. But, as happens from time to time, I was waylaid – ambushed – by a poem that simply demanded to be included here.
It’s a poem I have long known but somehow, reading it again this week, I felt that no other would do. Written by the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly, it plays fast and loose with so many of poetry’s so-called ‘rules’ that there may be some people who will cry, “Is that a poem?”
It doesn’t rhyme; its punctuation is fluid, to say the least, many of its line breaks seem arbitrary (although they are not), and its ‘voice’ is that of a child. Yet its wisdom brings me back to read and re-read it again and again. I hope you enjoy it.
Poem from a Three Year Old
And will the flowers die? And will the people die?And every day do you grow old, do I grow old, not I’m not old, do flowers grow old? Old things – do you throw them out? Do you throw old people out? And how you know a flower that’s old? The petals fall, the petals fall from flowers, and do the petals fall from people too, every day more petals fall until the floor where I would like to play I want to play is covered with old flowers and people all the same together lying there with petals fallen on the dirty floor I want to play the floor you come and sweep with the huge broom. The dirt you sweep, what happens that, what happens all the dirt you sweep from flowers and people, what happens all the dirt? Is all the dirt what’s left of flowers and people, all the dirt there in a heap under the huge broom that sweeps everything away? Why you work so hard, why brush and sweep to make a heap of dirt? And who will bring new flowers? And who will bring new people? Who will bring new flowers to put in water where no petals fall on to the floor where I would like to play? Who will bring new flowers that will not hang their heads like tired old people wanting sleep? Who will bring new flowers that do not split and shrivel every day? And if we have new flowers, will we have new people too to keep the flowers alive and give them water? And will the new young flowers die? And will the new young people die? And why?
Brendan Kennelly From A Time For Voices: Selected Poems 1960-1990, Bloodaxe Books, 1990
