There seems to be signs for every occasion and every level of stupidity. Here’s one I saw recently which I liked. “I don’t like being old so it doesn’t take much to piss me off.” On a T shirt I read “the older I get the less life sentence means to me.” A caption on a short video I just watched says, “Everybody wants to be the captain until it’s time to do captain stuff.” That’s certainly been my experience. And then there are really dumb-assed road signs which say things like “Be Prepared To Stop.” Are there really folks out there who aren’t? There probably are!
The recent Virtual Fisher Poets Gathering went extremely well. I’m amazed at the talent which coordinated all the performers from around the planet and threaded them together like pearls on a string. Kudos to all and let’s hope we don’t have to do it again. Here’s the link to my little gig, I am on right at the 1:18 hour mark.
Following is a little piece I wrote in tribute to the wonder of it all.
Fisher Poets 2021
I sit mesmerized in front of my computer screen
absorbing all I can of the lights and depths of musicians and poets,
my peers, my muses, my confessors and affirmers, my fellows
from around the long curves of the planet
who are possessed by the common bond of sea-bound masochism
and the thrust and sway and plunge of living water beneath our keels.
This strange gathering was all made possible by the discovery of the electron
and the spreading wake of technology
and now we take for granted our instant ability to see the universe
through the pinprick camera lense of our computer screen.
Try to explain this to someone fifty years ago,
We would have been considered as mad as a hootchie.
I watch as a senior fisherman named Gary reads to the world
from the confines of a spare room and uttered wisdoms
you only gain from the peace and terror long-lived at sea.
Through the open door of that room
I can see a lady, presumably his wife, in another room,
sitting in front of a window
through which I see lights of other buildings in the night.
She is busy with her own endeavors
painting a picture perhaps or maybe knitting
I feel very much an intruder in that home
and I marvel at the different worlds
so far apart
even though we touch mutually oblivious to our passing.
This particular poet lives in old Port Hadlock
A place I know well
I have anchored there on more than one long winter night
sheltering from a brisk Sou-easter
in front of the wooden boat school and a fine quaint restaurant
and who can resist a place with names like ‘The Old Alcohol Plant?’
I feel a familiar ache as I imagine the gentle rumble of
anchor chain on bottom, the flicker of my oil lamps.
I hear the echoes of my own addiction to the sea
duplicated in the words and tunes of my fellows
I am in the affirming company of fellow mariners
who I’m sure all long to reach out and
draw each other into firm embrace
but we sit safe in our homes
like goldfish in a bowl
only an arm’s length away.
Well, like the little pig stuttered, “Tha, tha, that’s all folks.” There are some big (to me) changes coming which will upgrade this blog to make it more suitable for plans ahead.
You’ll be the first to know.
“All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.”
― Will Rogers