Best Defeatist Poems
Wish all my friends on Poetry Soup a joyful, peace filled and prosperous New Year!
As the glow of 2022 has died out
When a new dawn’s halo is round the arc
Best wishes and prayers from all hearts sprout
‘Let a new world of light emerge from the dark’
Let us wait to see new hopes blooming
Grab the little joys the mind can contain
Dismiss all defeatist thoughts surfacing
Warmly greet the New Year about to begin
The stream of life glides gurgling
Listen to its dulcet rhythmic refrain
Put down smothering blues brewing
Cast away all sad and throttling pain
Inhale the salubrious air and begin again
Hope for happier times, day after day
With enormous appetite, life’s zest, regain
Newer vistas will open up and come to stay
* * * * *
Jan.1.2023
“Wake to the chirping of birds, get elated by their songs, allow the music to settle in your heart and dismiss all defeatist thoughts. Instead of burrowing like a mole, fly high like a bird” ~ By Poet
Oh! Lovely little bird, soaring and swirling,
Sliding and sweeping, making the sky your pathway,
Possessing the poet’s soul, you make me cheerful,
With songs mellifluous and melodious.
You dive and glide through cotton candy clouds,
With dizzy spells and a spirit so buoyant.
You roam and ride through air, trusting on your wings.
You are out on an odyssey to cross a thousand seas.
With black and beady eyes, you spot everything,
And watch the world from up above.
You wear a dazzling robe of vivid bluish hues.
You have rainbow pinions and a beak so sleek.
You chirpy friend, as you sing in tuneful voice from above,
Your songs fall in my ears as midnight choir from afar.
As you warble in sweet rhythm and lovely cadence,
You tell me that sweet spring of beauty and bliss is here.
Line of inquiry:
“What if life is a lucid dream
Borne by thoughts we ourself did stream
Wherein our designated role
Is to dance atop love’s moonbeam”
A new sunrise is born with love's advent
Binding every heart, throbbing every sinew
Filling every hollow, silencing every sigh
Making the earth fresh as morning dew.
When love overpowers every heart,
A new world is born free of all strife
With glossy dreams borne of our own thoughts,
Rendering a fresh glow to the whole of life.
Love is the song that make us twirl in joy.
With it, the universe gets woven in endless grace.
It is a force that overcomes every defeatist thought.
Love shall eternally burn, illumining every space.
May love weave, its mesmerizing rhythm
And let’s dance atop love’s moon beam.
As an Epiphany dawns, ride the crest of a wave
Cradled in the folds of a new hope, a new dream!
To disrobe the lion’s ego,
would be to destroy a charismatic higher light
dethrone a regal rightous dominance
denounce a fierce protective energy
with pride of a warrior, never repudiate royalty
forswear fealty is to renounce a king of truth
whilst in his den, uncloaked he and his lioness
of regal virtue, love eternal and loyalty
when you engage with ultimate hierarchy,
roars of authority warn and ward risk taking rivals
with gifted instincts, a supreme stubborn strength
and a keen bond and respect for his own
an affectionate and generous warmth
confident yet cautious in their garden of Eden
defeatist disrobes the ego, only when defeated
deep within the soul, we yearn for substance
a spiritual substance sustaining us
the creature sustains as messenger
deeper significance beyond physical form
depicting qualities from the universe
butterflies symbolize transformation,
the turtle patience, the elephant a mighty sooth,
the lion links divine wisdom and perceives truth
FEEL AFRICA
Silence!
Silence Africa!
One can hardly get Africa to be silent;
Africa habours a pulsating bubble.
Everyone in Africa bounces to rhythm resilient.
Africa, like Zambia, or
Zambia, like Africa;
Dear ones, whichever comes first
Swells with energy in the sun!
You see not the pulse;
You feel every ounce.
Feel it now!
Woo! Woo! Is it fun or funny?
Africa loves to dance.
The continent is one huge drum;
One complete dance!
They work hard too.
Mothers and daughters,
Fathers and sons;
Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law
Of Africa work hard
They fetch water; they collect wood.
They pound corn; they cook their food.
In all their creation,
People of Africa have one ingredient;
SONG!
You hear them sing while pounding corn.
Phew! Phew! Wow!
At funerals we sing and dance,
At weddings, even more song and dance.
Nothing has ever stopped Africa from dancing;
Yes! Even the tragedies we’ve known;
The genocides and ethnic cleansings,
in the heart of the continent.
Apartheid in the Cape of Good Hope;
Starvation, hunger, war;
Famines, droughts and floods
In the great lakes and the horn of Africa!
We have mourned;
We have questioned!
Mmmh! Courage!
Courage is what kept us alive.
We felt like throwing it away;
Accepting defeatist tendencies;
Choose revenge; and hurt;
Not with Africa.
We have come out reassured.
We have emerged tested in fire;
More finer and stronger than before
We can afford to pray!
We are like lions; the pride of the universe.
Our pride lies in our landscapes; the mountains
And the valleys;
the plateaus and the savannahs.
Free flowing rivers,
Connect us with worlds near and far.
We accommodate strangers as our rivers instruct.
Strangers of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans;
The seas and lakes!
They brought the world to us
as they did bring us to the world;
the Zambezi, the Nile and the Congo.
They have made us larger than we have ever been.
We can join in the songs and dances of others
As they can join ours too.
Come join us; feel at home!
Feel Africa!
One Zambia, my dear one;
The little star of copper.
You shine deep in the heart of the continent;
Warming the cold and frightened neighbours!
The blessing you are is the blessing you offer.
You exemplify unity in multiplicity,
Of languages and ethnicity;
Be not afraid copper star.
Shine as bright as you do;
Only warmer!
All rights reserved.
Permanently resting upon steel tracks,
a retired rail car passes the time,
weathering away.
Contents empty,
it is a lonely shell, abandoned
on an unused track
in an overgrown pasture,
unseen and forgotten.
Tired after decades of service,
it groans when the hard winds blow.
Scampers of critters can be heard
reverberating through the hollow.
It moans in the defeatist melancholy mod
that it has become.
Dressed in the attire of spray painted graffiti,
the rail car rust in the tears of depressed years.
Beautiful sadness it has become...
unable and unstable to ever ride again.
Of all things I have learned about the world it is this,
Anything is possible.
And nothing has yet shaken that belief
Of course just knowing it has been enough to both delight me and
Give me nightmares.
Yet they both these feelings pale into insignificance compared to my
Daily frustration at seeing and hearing people who say so many things are Impossible to them.
It is hard not to weep when all I hear is
You can't win or we will never get rid of it or nothing will change.
But that is not the worst,
No the worst is hearing someone who is in charge of fixing a problem
Telling us that it can't be done,
Not the least because, given this defeatist attitude,
It is unlikely that they will pull out all the stops or encourage others
To support them in trying to fix the issue.
Yet despite all of my fluctuating feelings I still cling to my belief that anything is Possible when I have friends still left who thumb their noses at those running the show
And keep on making the impossible possible,
Making my worst nightmares a little less possible.
The deep and sonorous voice of
his defeatist self-talk was paternal,
and torturous,
reinforcing the force fed message,
"There is no happiness,
only gradients of misery,"
leaving him indifferent to the present,
careless of the future.
Reared in the shadows of perfection,
parental conflicts played out
as the "self-made men"
of a fathers' generation chased ambitions
beyond the cramped lives
of their own youth.
Affection and approval,
bestowed and withdrawn
by the performance scale;
he was a sundial
numbering only sunny hours,
with little of consequence to say,
a lucid, inquisitive and fertile mind.
His native endowment
a vivid sensibility for the beauty
of words.
He learned woman from
his quint-essential sisters
yet remained profoundly ignorant of women;
if love were happiness
it generated a loneliness
made all the more desperate
by the intimacy of severed connections.
Psychic numbness, and fauxbia,
yes, he feared being false,
had plunged him into darkness,
with his vision
of a minimum level of connectedness,
the raw ache of personal loss,
the empty feeling of helplessness.
Forced to live as that outsider
trapped inside a familys' feuds;
being bonded to survivors,
learning to live with the understanding
he would be jettisoned for others to survive:
emotional dishonesty became
necessary for survival.
Denial was the best defense
since he could change nothing
and repression had long since
ceased to offer relief;
he was too articulate
for that lie.
The tightly packed crowd
contained inside his head was
momentarily frozen by the question
"How to unlearn the lessons of his youth?"
To love and be loved, a necessary condition,
a prerequisite to a happiness
that could not exist?
Now, he works,
and writes,
and trusts in simple verities;
chaos, pacified by distance and routine,
serve to mitigate the sting
of realitys' reminder -
he'd found that so urgently sought,
only to have lost it in the finding.
Page 1
1963
I sent you away from me to look for our beloved.
I watched you fade in the distant as you walked down the dusty foot-path towards town.
My dull brain craves the lost opportunity to prevail upon you of my broken spirit.
The sun shined brightly on the magnolia trees and blossom azalea bushes, but my vision is locked on your fading figure down that long dusty foot-path.
For hours I stood in the doorway until the evening sky ingest the sun.
Escaping the nuisance sting of mosquitoes, the croaking of frogs, and the longing calls of the loon, I managed to move my stiff body to my knitting chair near the water stain window.
But not a purl could I make, and so I sat consumed with illogical and negative thoughts until the rooster announced the dawn.
An encouraging thought my mind doth not bring as I watched your woeful soul kick up the dust of the foot-path with your shabby boots.
A defeatist frail of a man was you as you made those hesitant steps in my direction.
Perfervid loathing eclipsed my heart as you move nearer and nearer, closing the distance between us.
I did not care to treat the bruises on your face and body.
I did not want to caress you nor offer you consoling words to comfort you and ease your troubled heart.
No, not with an afflicted heart.
No words could explain the emptiness I felt for you.
You grab for me to comfort.
I slapped you and turned away.
A storm was raging inside of me.
Nothing was distinctly visible around me.
I resisted strongly the upsurging of unconsciousness.
No disguises of truth were acceptable.
Continue on page 2
copyright@Library Of Congress Looking At The Light From The Bottom Of The Lake.
Ruminating over the droning sound deep down my heart
Is a nerve wrecking experience of my hidden fear
Not of any suffering nor death of my loved and dear
Neither materialistic loss is suffering's counterpart
Losing my grit and strength could be my malefactor
In the long ongoing struggles of life's voluminosity
They wallow me up in the arms of night's luminosity
The defeatist attitude of giving up is my worst fear factor
Rhyme: abba, cddc
June 21, 2016
For Laura Loo
My Worst Fear Factor
Enslaving Love
by Odin Roark
An eagle rides the updraft
Peering down at the happenings
Man's best friend wags his tail
Hesitantly
A bouquet of flowers seeks the sun
Amidst relationship's cold-draft unrest
A baby simply close its eyes
Rejecting intrusion on innocence
So goes the conspiracy of the have-nots
Guised in sanguine images of love
How few fight back
Accepting the status quo
As contemporary truth
Families
The worst offenders
Politicians strong second
Bossdom at work, close third
Reality dictates
Agendas rule
And agendas are allegiant
To only their own moi
How insipid grows this weed of mind
A torturous maintenance
Made defeatist by default
Rendering but mulch as offspring
Yet
Some of dumb luck
Persevere
Finding somewhere
Antidotes for poison
Perhaps it's the unpolluted glass of water
The walk along a pristine forest path
Sitting on ancient sand
Ocean waters lapping one's feet
Willingness to drink in nature again
Disallowing today's misanthropic trend
To seduce what's left
For some
The echo is fierce
**** me
**** you
At Last
09/08/2018
Old thoughts in my mind
Found it hard to be kind
Undeserving, unnerving
Unwilling to unwind
So positivity blind,
To myself unkind
Defeatist, hedonist
True pleasure find
Searching for moderation
Full of resignation
Obsessive, compulsive
Unsure of destination
Questioning my commitment
Thought I’d be committed
Irrational, delusional
Suicide attempt committed
Sanity a soul search
Don’t snuff out my torch
Hopeful, loathful
Alone in the lurch
Reaching down deep
Ruminating can’t sleep
Deception, reflection
Decide to take the leap
Hard to ask for help
Though willing in self
Castigated, Motivated
Bereft of my health
Detox, rehab the help I need
Drugs, my mind and body plead
Addiction, affliction
A hunger, greed a need I feed
Clean of mind and thought
New thinking I’m taught
Sobriquet, Sobriety
Balance in life sought
Do it for self
For no one else
Dedicate, unmedicate
True wealth in health
Physical, mental, health balance
Self love forgiveness, all encompass
Spiritual, physical
True to self at last
Some seek—and find--the brighter side of life;
we call these smiling people optimists.
Some only see the bad. These pessimists
are grim, defeatist, and quite often PISSED!
July 25, 2018, entered in Kevin Shaw's Life or Death Epigram contest
Every now and then, every so often,
I'm approached by they needing advice regarding their poor situation.
I offer them what I know to be a most helpful suggestion.
The response I usually receive is, "That's easier said than done,"
and this generally fills me with major frustration.
For me, "That's easier said than done," has the following translation;
"That's easier said than done, so I won't even bother to try."
No positive changes ever happen and they can't figure out why.
"That's easier said than done," is a defeatist attitude.
"That's easier said than done," is what's destroying you.
It's a destructive cliche that affects everyone.
I wish it would disappear, but that's easier said than done.
8, A Trait Higher than Nature
Every Year Sing "Hallel" on July "11's",
A Stroke Grew Tall, Into My Life's Elm,
Prior, in 2005, Our Chassna Dance!
Now, Our Foot "Pattie Cake" is Seldom.
8 Denotes Transcendence,
Judaism is Not in the Natural Realm,
No Nature's Laws Correspondence,
"Ayn Ode Milvado" has the Helm!
"Rise Above Our Nature" Ascendance,
Assorted "Odd Bod'" Handicaps, "Jell 'Em!"
In Sum, Obstacles Aren't Iron, Look Askance,
Serve Hashem "B'Simcha", Attitude "Quells 'Em!"
Never Say Never nor "Defeatist Chants",
Transcend the Adverse, Surprise Them,
Purim "MeSheloach Manos" to Enemy Stances,
Make Friends, Try to Opponents Stem!
You'll Get Disbelieving Glances,
Shrug Them Off, Saying "Amen & Ahem!",
Sincerely Sing "What Are the Chances?",
Keep Trouble Off Balance, "Tzoros" Amend!
"More of You is Emerging!" Barbara Announces,
I Ask Myself "Is This the Coma's End?"
My Wife & I, One Another Enhances,
Marital Bliss, We Each Other Send!