@barrythemod,
VALKYRIE*
Once one has learned to experience a poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing oneself as a human being. I find this especially true of autobiographical prose-poetry which is the main genre of poetry that I write. This experiencing of oneself as a human being, of course, can be experienced by we humans in a myriad of ways.
The English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold(1822-1888) was attempting to describe this effect of poetry on the writer, and hopefully readers, when he referred to "that grand power of poetry...to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of things and our relations with them."1 I would not have understood these words of Arnold’s in the years before I became a poet but, I now have this feeling, after at least two decades of extensive poetizing(1992-2012). This feeling is renewed after writing each poem.
As I write this revision of the poem Valkyrie, after watching the film Valkyrie for a second time this week, this same feeling was renewed. Valkyrie a 2008 American historical thriller set in Nazi Germany during World War II. It depicts the 20 July plot in 1944 by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and to use the Operation Valkyrie national emergency plan to take control of the country2. –Ron Price with thanks to 1J. Ciardi,
How Does A Poem Mean, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1959, p. 3; 2
Wikipedia, and *In Norse mythology a Valkyrie is a term from Old Norse, valkyrja, meaning "chooser of the slain." It is one of a host of female figures who decides who falls and dies in battle.
It was turning at last
against them and those
conspirators very nearly
assassinated him, just 3
days before I was born.1
It was turning at last
to another terrible kind
of darkness: worse, far
worse, than that old war.
It was then that I was born:
at the beginning of this new
darkness, fifty years after
the birth of an old Light,2
a Light which seems to
spread more slowly, so
slowly, unobtrusively, so
as not be seen as a threat,
at least not in these times.
As a great darkness and its
encompassing gloom spreads
again, slough of despond, as
those troubled forecasts of
doom do battle with phantoms
of the many wrongly informed
imaginations and our days pass
swiftly as the twinkle of a star
at this crucial turning point of a
juncture in history. And as I try
to make my mark: unbeknownst.3
Of course, it all depends on what
you look at now and in that century
of Light when seeds were and are
being scattered for many harvests
ahead as well as their sweet and
bountiful luxuriance & verdure.
1 An assassination attempt on Hitler's life was made on 20 July 1944, three days before I was born. Operation Valkyrie was a German Army plan that was converted into an attempted coup d'état. This coup d’etat failed after the 20 July 1944 plot. The 2008 film Valkyrie was based on events surrounding the operation. By 23/7/’44 the Nazis had begun to round-up and kill all the conspirators.
2 fifty years after the birth of the Baha'i Faith in North America in 1894.
3 Universal House of Justice, April 1999.
Ron Price
31 August 1998 to 30 January 2012
