Repetition
Bert Haverkate-Ens
I have come to the age when I repeat myself.
Let me try that again: I have come to the age when I realize
that I repeat myself.
No, I must try that one more time: I have come to the age
when I realize that I am repeating someone else.
I am not making any of this up.
That would be blasphemy, or maybe merely plagiarism.
I was standing on the Kaw River Bridge.
I heard the train a comin’ –
a rollin’ round the bend.
And then, through the leaves of a tree, at something like
more than a 100 yards away, I saw that beveled, blocky orange Burlington
Northern and Santa Fe locomotive appear, rounding that last bit of bend and
begin to bear down on me, toward a spot well beneath my feet, to be precise.
For long, glorious seconds it powered right at me, getting larger, and larger,
and then it was just one container car after the next for an age in train years
until the tracks were empty.
Mr. Cash said part of that, so memorably, so long ago, in my
years.
But as I was saying, it is the words of others that I am
writing.
Someone said it sooner. Someone said it more memorably.
Ah, there’s the crack in the universe.
So you don’t forget, language goes back a long time, beyond
the tower of Babel, beyond the first writing, beyond the first word. I’ll not
elaborate, but reputable sources trace all things back something like 15
billion years.
I frankly cannot imagine who could have made some
singularity - some call it that - containing so astronomically much potential -
ex nihilo, as some say.
But then how?
Why?
But I will not now elaborate on that much repeated and
disputed tale.
I am interested in the blink between the moment of my birth
and the inexorably approaching moment when my eyes will never open upon this
earth again.
There has been some expansion in the universe since the Big
Bang, some expansion in language since the first word, but Ecclesiastes said it
memorably, so very long ago in cultural years: there is nothing new under the
sun.
Without going back over a lot of thinking and writing that
has gone on, in my own time, the time I am interested in at this moment, I seem
to be writing in a time of repetition.
Surely, I put words and phrases in different orders, and at
the pace we read and listen we may not realize that we’ve read and heard this
all before.
That’s the crack.
Our memory.
So, I am not playing on saying something new, something
never said before. Only something you’ve never heard before.
I aim to play a note so sweet that it will ring in your
memory for perhaps as long - and maybe longer - as it took for me to hear that
whistle out well beyond my sight and then I waited, waited for that train to come
round that bend. And then I felt what I felt. And I wished I could put it into
words.
Maybe one day, with practice, I will repeat someone’s words,
maybe some I have echoed myself, having long forgotten the source, so memorably
that you will walk out on that bridge and wait – to discover if they are true.
walktokaw.blogspot.com
Writing nonsense in my head
Bert Haverkate-Ens
Ran into Starbucks.
A silver dollar
for an unlined sheet of paper
and a number 2 pencil.
My cache is full.
Words,
whole lines
are spilling over
into the cracks of the sidewalk.
A half-polished thought
slipped through my circuits
and rolled into the storm drain.
Coffee can wait.
I’m losing my mind faster
than I can cram
new ideas into the leaks.
Should have bought
that smartphone
before pens
became scarcer
than swords.
We have poetry
Bert Haverkate-Ens
We will not be friends.
Our childhoods were too far apart.
An afternoon over a cup of coffee
we never shared.
We will not meet, nor shall we hug.
But I have read your words,
and I have come to know something
about how you feel about the world,
and I have begun to care
about what you have to say.
So there is something between us,
if not quite friendship.
Write soon.
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