The Good Old Days

September 28, 2016
by Elusive Trope
comments 24
My Poetry

index

it’s the old story
of no food in the cupboard
of only the strong survive

of bending but not breaking

of how the old dogged reporter
gets the scoop
shares secrets
about the emperors of coin

of having proof changes nothing

 

The Secret Keeper’s Weekly Writing Challenge #56
| Scoop | Share | Proof | Bend | Secret |
Image from The New York Public Library: Lewis Wickes Hines, “One of the many young newsboys selling late at night…, November 1912”

 

24 Comments

  2. thefeatheredsleep says

    Ah my friend. This is just terrific. How truth shines when you tell it. A very bleak and real perspective and hope glimmers at the edges.

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    • Elusive Trope says

      glad to hear the hope on the edges came through an otherwise grim view…somehow we do find a way to muddle through, there are those out there still trying to speak truth to power.

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      • thefeatheredsleep says

        I love the word ‘grim’ for some reason it brings me hope, I realize that makes absolutely no sense but I believe when we see something negative we also see a way to transform it, so I focus more on that than say, being superstitious about seeing something negatively and only being positive, I feel we lose more when we do that, than if we face what is true and take from it, the redemptive. xo You are an exquisite writer my friend but I know you know that as I have told you so often and meant it every time xo

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        • Elusive Trope says

          the admiration is mutual as the saying goes. 🙂

          You got me thinking: There is a constant struggle to sustain the notion of the “redemptive” because it entails maintaining the notion that we all inherently (at the very least) participate in (and perpetuate in some fashion) a world that results in us needing to seek redemption. Or causes us to seek to re-affirm our redeeming qualities as doubt starts to take over. It’s hard not to feel guilty just setting in a traffic jam, one’s car just another car among thousands, all inching bumper to bumper while the car spews out its toxic exhaust.

          So maybe one part of this as a old (eccentric) professor of mine said to me once while talking about his dissertation on the evils of the United Fruit Company: we never know when we are walking hand in hand with evil. What blood is there on that cheap banana in December at the local grocery store?

          From this perspective, one can understand better theater director Herbert Blau’s point when he wrote: if you’re not part of the problem, you’re not part of the solution.

          Society and ourselves are flawed, but some of this is of no one’s fault. It’s the standard no-one-ever-promised-you-a-rose-garden kind of thing. As individuals we deal with the grim as best as we can, sometimes coming face-to-face with the traumatic, which leaves its scars. We don’t always makes the right choices or respond in the healthiest of ways (thanks in part to the scars we carry around), but if we keep trying, make the effort, struggle to do what is “right,” we can possibly at times find redemption.

          [Harvey Keitel’s grim film “Bad Lieutenant” popped into my mind. How even in a wretched debased cop will still seek to achieve that stare of redemption]

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          • thefeatheredsleep says

            (great film) I agree, I think it’s this existential guilt that some feel and wonder why, why do I feel responsible? They feel responsible for being born into a world that ensures without their doing a thing they are already part of the problem. And in a way if you choose that, then you divide your soul and are immune, but if you do not choose that, and moreover are born into it through succession where upon the stage is set and the players are in place, you look around with bewilderment wondering how you compromised yourself even before you got started? It is because we walk on the shoulders of those before us, sometimes on the graves, sometimes we benefit from their suffering and if you are tapped into that you know it and so a pleasure cannot simply be a pleasure. Example; I love clothes. But when I see a gorgeous outfit I realize that someone somewhere who has so little made this and I benefit from it and the imbalance makes the pleasure vanquish. I feel that way when I travel also it is a bitter sweet feeling, loving travel hating the tourist part, and the subjugated locals. So you ask is it possible to be redemptive when perhaps we are already so mired? I think in part no it is not, but in part that’s all we have, and yet it is, because even one person saying one thing means something, and even one thing can change everything.

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