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AFTERWORD

Gentle Reader,

What you’ll find below is an upside-down anthology of sorts: a journal of my frequent nightly musings from January 2008 till now, in reverse order.

Much of what I write here is verse in traditional rhymed iambic pentameters, old fashioned in form but contemporary in topics and idiom. It asks to be read aloud so that the effects of rhyme and meter may be felt.

Sometimes I write brief prose essays, but even my verses are essays, or attempts, pursuing a line of thought to some conclusion, though more sonorously than those in prose: discursive verses, I call them.

In either case, you’re the reader over my shoulder as I write, which makes my writing different than when I have no audience in mind but only a vague urge to express. So I thank you for whatever attention you give my words and thoughts and feelings because you might so easily attend to something else, and you soon will.

To beguile you to linger longer, though, I’ve coupled most of my compositions with a photo or image I’ve taken or borrowed, which sometimes corresponds with my words of that day.

Thank you for visiting here. I hope you enjoy your stay and are moved to come back soon.

—Alan Nordstrom

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THE COMPROMISE

As in the wandering woods diverge two roads,

So life presents two elemental modes,

And we may choose unique or uniform,

To be oneself or blindly to conform.

Or is it that we need to compromise

Because our true identities arise

When we adopt the idols of our tribe

And then adapt to what our souls devise.

Thus do we prove our dual sapience,

Being led by insight and experience,

What’s proved by centuries of trials and errors

And what’s imbued to save us from our terrors.

Though common in our core humanity,

Without our souls we’re merely vanity.

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ORIGINAL BLESSING

What keeps humanity from being humane
Or humankind from acting truly kind?
Ingraft insanity makes us insane;
We grow the way our nature is inclined.

So say determinists who think us base
By birth, hard-wired to be egotists
And only to be saved by heavenly grace
That overwhelms what devilish power resists.

What if, however, not original sin,
But innate grace and primal dignity
May be assumed the way that we begin—
In innocence, but not immunity?

Unless our dignity is well maintained,
That innocence we’re born with will be stained.

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A BETTER WAY

Two ways there are to treat another being:
The one is binding and the other freeing;
The first puts down, the other raises up;
One desiccates, one serves a loving cup;

One undermines, the other lends support;
One is dismaying, the other blithe with sport.
While one would starve, the other cultivates;
One wears a frown, the other one elates;

One darkens with despite, the second lights,
For hate subverts and love lifts to the heights.
The one undignifies, disdains, denies,
Demeans, defeats, belittles and belies—

Choose which: to be a rude contrarian
Or something new: a Dignitarian.

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SWEET TWEETS & BITTER TWITTERS

When I do count the characters I tweet,

I find that I can stack them straight and neat

Into a pair of couplets, line by line,

One hundred forty long in this design. (128)

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Yet if I should prefer another kind

Of verse in which to tweet that’s just as neat

As couplets, rhyming quatrains come to mind,

Counting not only characters but feet. (137)

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Add one more tweet onto these foregone twit[ters,]

More polished than before, a tweet that glit[ters]

And shows the art of ancient craftly fit[ters]

Who, sticking to their last, were never quit[ters.] (140)

*

They plied their trade and measured well to sing

As sweet as songbirds twittering in the spring. (79)

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THE GATESGATE AFFAIR

“Gates irate; Crowley growly” —Fax News

The night that Henry Louis Gates

Let slip his secret, bridled hates

Upon a hapless Cambridge cop

Who took him for a thief to stop

From breaking into someone’s house

And called him something worse than “louse,”

It turned out it was Gates’ own home,

That he’d been somewhere—China, Rome—

And, now returned, had lost his keys,

Broke in—to be nabbed by police.

All hell broke loose as tempers flared,

Insults were bandied, neighbors stared,

Handcuffs were clasped, the Harvard prof,
Shoved in a car, was carried off.

How did this end? You’d never guess:

This brouhaha made such a mess

Of headlines that the President

(A friend of Gates) broke precedent,

Took sides, assuming the police

Had acted “stupidly” at least,

That racial profiling was used

And Gates’ dignity abused.

It ends this way, as on the lawn

Of the White House, where are gone

Hot words, cool heads now appear

On all the parties and their beer.

*

ECO-DIGNITARIANSM

Once the ideas of rankism and dignitarianism take root in your mind, new shoots of thought begin to ramify, new instances and applications sprout.

For instance, animals, or the Earth itself: “Don’t treat the Earth like dirt,” exhorts a bumper sticker I’ve seen. Does not the lovely, living ecosystem of this planet deserve respect from its most predatory species—us?

Our rape of “resources” and our wanton decimation of other species abuses the dignity of other precious life-forms. Our inhumane maltreatment of animals, mammals especially, demeans our own humanity, undignifying us.

“But,” you say, “in a dog-eat-dog world, such tender sensibilities would only lead to our extinction. We must fight to survive. It’s eat or be eaten. Ask Darwin.”

It’s not always that stark, I reply, and our intelligence allows us to think more widely and wisely, if we so choose. We can observe how cooperation among populations and species often works more to the advantage of all than does domination and exploitation.

For the sake of cultivating kindness in ourselves (an essential virtue), we need to consider how our attitudes and actions can become more Earth friendly and more ecologically savvy, which includes developing empathy and reverence for all the valuable life-forms that Earth’s evolution has engendered.

How high on the food-chain can we eat with good health and in good conscience? With what reverence and respect do we honor what nourishes us? These, I think, are vital dignitarian questions to ponder as we reform the rankist practices now prevailing.

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