Impermanence

Sadder the early death of Schubert

Than Du Fu’s troupe of dancing girls!*

Done his work, Eighth symphony unfinished.

Perhaps it did not like to stay?

And they were vapid things, no doubt—

Their painted cheeks give them away

("now yellow dust," needless to say).

Poets delight in impermanence

In their melancholic way,

I, in the pears ripened to perfection

In the fruit drawer of my fridge.

I’ll eat another one today!

*Du Fu, 712-70 CE, “Jade Flower Palace,” translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth

Halloween 2026

Omnibossity

When I was a schoolboy in the Great Karoo of yore,

Not knowing who’d said it, or caring what it meant,

But liking its stab of Late Victorian oratory,

We hurled Disraeli’s jibe at Gladstone,

A rhetorician, Dizzy'd mocked, “inebriated

With the exuberance of his verbosity,”

At any boy who chose to talk too much,

“Verbosity” mutated in our teasing mouths

To “amnibossity,” or “omnibossity.”

Language, though, has the hidden power

Of unadorning untold truth:

"Omnibossity” was law under apartheid,

The master motto of the ruling state.

“They also rule who only stand in wait!”

That mascot's my own concoction,

Shorting the knockout pet of youth,

But may undoubtedly endower

Much that's been said and done of late.

Friday, October 30, 2026

Optimism

The culture of Europe, and the civilization that has sprung from it, are not yet dead. The opportunity remains to give our best to them, and to receive, in reward, the experience of belonging.—Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach

Six hundred million years ago, the great explosion

Of life we now call the Cambrian laid the foundations of our world,

And that radiation, science says, was based on feces,*

Yes, shit. So if you feel we’re up to the neck in it now,

Consider: this, too, may well do its bit.

* https://phys.org/news/2026-08-fecal-revolution-earth-ecosystems.html

Tuesday, October 28, 2026