With flick of fanned out tail, the Kite flies deftly,
With dancer’s grace, descends through applauding sky,
Performs a pirouette, majestic dive,
Then swoops and thus commits audacious theft.
Through avian guile she artfully steals my breath
And gripping firm, takes flight, and rises high.
Leaving my standing ovation behind, she flies
Into the distance, fading. I’m bereft.
Sometimes I wish that I possessed her freedom.
Perhaps I do! I have no wings but in
Their place imagination’s feathers thrust
Me upwards seeking visions of what could be.
Their range is more than hers has ever been,
Could dreaming meet this reaching wanderlust?
Red kites have recently established themselves in our neighbourhood. One regularly frequents the air above our garden. Watching it’s effortless flight inspired this sonnet, although it’s taken most of the week to knock it into some sort of shape.
(28.01.23)
© Ben Quant 2023
Image: Tim Felce (Airwolfhound), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Imagination
Poem 103 – True Time Lord Science
It’s bigger on the inside
Each visitor exclaims
When entering the Tardis
That Time Lord miracle
Too quickly we dismiss this
As simply science fiction
The stuff of story not
Real life as we know it
But sorry, that’s nonsense
Just stop and think a while
Someone created all
Within that universe
This universe of wonders
They held within their mind
Compressed, proving the point
It’s bigger on the inside
The creative capacity of the human brain will never cease to marvel me. How can something so small be at the same time so vast.
(06.03.22)
© Ben Quant 2022
Poem 29 – I Think?
Where do my thoughts come from
Are they simply distillation
Of experiences lived and situations seen
A concept torn from conversation shared
Meme like infection spread
Is it true that there is nothing new under the sun
Were they never really mine
Merely a compilation of others’
Mashed, macerated and recompiled
Should I think therefore I am
(As someone once thought!)
Instead read
They think therefore I become
Uniqueness simply a statistical recombination
A regurgitation of what has been before
Is it not possible that in my being
Some organic Hadron Collider
Crashes borrowed insights
And from the impact sparks
Something new
Something me
Sitting down to write today having read a few poems online written by others and mulling over what to write, it struck me how hard it is to write something truly original. The words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes came to mind:
What has been will be again,
Eccles. 1:9
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.’
Is it true that we have nothing original to offer?
(08.11.21)
© Ben Quant 2021
Ode for the Day 