Wandering with the Wind...

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Today's a bad day, and I have A LOT to rant about, but...well, first things first.

Right, apparently my e-mail's experiencing some problems now so I'm having difficulties sending the poem to Mrs Tan; she asked if she could read it today morning, and yea, of course she can. It's supposed to be a parody of "To Be or Not to Be", but then I called it off and decided that it was more like a poem inspired by Shakespeare's roundabout ramblings rather than a parody.

Rule number 1: Parodies are funny. Mine, no.

Rule number 2: Parodies can mock the original creator's works - pushing aside the copyrights for now since Shakie is...well, put it in a nice way, gone to the "undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns". Ah, stuck in his own philosophies.

But what is written is written, and as the teacher commented, mine was pretty but sombre like I had a LOT to say. Actually I did, and one of my major writing problems is to manipulate humour skillfully enough to wrench the breath out of readers. Okies call it off - I'll put up the poem, maybe as my perspective and opinions towards war?

Hope the thing makes sense.

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Literature Choral Reading

Theme: War

To kill or not to kill: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis kinder in the heart to falter
With shots and bullets of tenebrous presage,
Or to hem in the remains of living love
And with heartlessness burn them? To die: to run;
No more; and by our deaths to reach the end
Of aimless escapade; the thousand winding roads
Our souls are enchained to, ‘tis a resolution
Ardently to be wish’d. To die, to run;
To run; perchance to flee: ay, there’s the rub;
For whilst we flee what darkness ahead may lie
When we have eschewed these bullets of ice,
And yet face more? There’s the torment
That stirs adversity into cold war;
For who could take the disparities of life,
The prejudiced cries, the rebellions’ say,
The pinch of hatred brewed, the people’s pain,
The slighting of beings of same living rights,
That, unseeing, draws us from our common stand,
When we ourselves our own quietus had made
With a glinting blade? Who would farther venture,
To cut and drown in swirling blood,
Oppressed by the dread of life so fast gone,
Toward the seeing eye in whose realm
No answer resides, benumbs the will
And makes us rather walk on paths underfoot
Than to wander whither we know not of?
Thus mystery does make cowards of us all;
And thus the humane light of acceptance
Is bleared o’er with the unsavory dust of thought,
And to think of all arduous trips embarked
Toward the hollow of this emptied pith,
Our call loses its reason.
To die: to run; at this crucial point
Whether ‘tis nobler to seek the words we hear
And adrift the sea be laid to peter; or run,
When life with mocking eye held in blackness
Of falling night sky, a light bereft of truth
Fading into future? There lies the wood
For one man’s fire, and a thousand spreads
From scintillating blade to dulling heart,
To die, to kill; by our misery take another
Into hell with us. Should our sanity hear
The cry we have yanked from the deeps of his gut,
The rustling of breath from his pale blue lips,
And dying, feel the weight of his pain?
To kill or not to kill;
There is no other question
That burns our hearts greater than any flame
Upon despair feeds.

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Okay guys I'm really sorry for dumping this whole chunk of words here without preamble, but for goodness' sake, thank Shakespeare for not paragraphing his originals. It was frustrating enough to analyse his hamlet speech; one question could stretch over a few lines, starting from what seems like a normal statement, chopped up with a few commas inbetween, and then ending with a darn question mark that totally throws you off and sets you revising the lines you've just read over and over. And the other thing is that he LOVES to use archaic words and olden day language.

Oh, but thanks to him, I did learn a few new words. Apparently some of my classmates were playing guessing games with his poetry and...yea, here's an example. Nan was just talking about roasting marshmallows over a bare bodkin ("bare bodkin", as adapted from Shakespeare's Hamlet Speech), trying to write her own parody of To Be or Not To Be, and I was like, "how do you do that?" and she was asking, "what's a bodkin anyway?"

A bodkin's a needle.

Roasting marshmallows over a needle.

Oh well, guess that makes perfect sense.

Hmm and now to my ultimate, honest, truthful reflections of yesterday's attempt at writing a poem based on To Be or Not To Be...it was FUN! Okay, challenging, and when I say that, I mean REALLY challenging, but fun in the meantime. His structure is a little...*cough* smothering if you try to imitate it, but all the same, literature is literature, and writing poems based on other works IS still poetry-writing after all. I haven't been writing poems for the past two months. This is a good break.

I think I'll just post another of my poem here, the one which I sent to my uncle over in America and, according to him, cheered him up from the mid-week fatigue. He works as a lawyer, and his English is awesome, but he needs to...well, melt his frozen report-like structure a little when he writes poetry. I've seen one of his poems before. I like his ideas and perspectives, but he's gotta open up, relax, be free and less rigid in his language.

Okay so here goes. This one's titled Wanderers, something I wrote when I was emoing and wondering over the joys and freedom of wanderers of all the ages behind us; well, I was thinking, maybe wanderers beyond our ages, our time, our world, and in something much more idealistic than what really holds the possibility of future existence. I'm kinda emotionally attached to wandering (spiritually, in a sense), and the wind is my favourite in nature. I hope that explains Pan's question about why I love to draw windblown leaves in my artworks.

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Wanderers

Down to the winds our path runs free
And follow its wake, past rock and tree
When night runs erelong with the day
And dawn treads genteel by our way
For along rivers we shall walk,
And ‘cross wild moorlands time has wrought,
Where ever our spirits are always born
To dance in the plains and sing this song!

Far, far, so far away!
Oceans swum and mountains lain!
Under the moon we wander afield,
Nary a sound to drown our lilt,
For so long a time we are free to fly
O’er the vales, and into the sky
Whence come thunder or wind or storm,
We’ll dance in the plains and sing this song!

Run, run, seers of time!
We know naught of past, and not of prime!
Yet ahead the road flows long,
And caverns deep with lights they shone,
For whither we head, we do not know
Past seas and hills and wealds of roe
And question then, why our spirits long
To dance in the plains and sing this song!

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Yup, that's about it for now. I don't have much time left and have to sign off soon. Well, just bfore I go, 2.4 almost killed me today and I got it done in 16.45 min, which sucked, but better than a fail anyway. Oh who cares about NAPFA. I don't like all those sports and physical stuff - well, with exceptions of team games like netball or relays though, anything in which we can work together to achieve a common goal.

And we're getting back our chem papers tomorrow, together with English Narrative Writing and Orals. Goodness, I'm so dead. Hope I don't fail chem.

I know it's too low of an expectation, and usually I look higher, but I like to set realistic goals. For now, judging by...circumstances, and our chem teacher's face regarding our class' performance, I think a pass is rewarding enough.

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~~~*Played with the winds at 7.24pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 6:36 PM

Roaming the Winds