The Spider's Web



I spent a lot of time in the Middle East in the 1980’s. I was president of a company that had a joint venture in Saudi Arabia. We did the operation and maintenance for 26 airports and some other military facilities. I also spent some time in Iran.

In the 1960’s I was deployed on a destroyer that visited several places in the same area. I wrote the poem “Entering the Gulf” (Daydreams, 2004) based on an actual experience on our ship, but I used that encounter as a metaphor for the larger issues that I found there in my later years.

I chose a picture to accompany the poem in Daydreams of a spider weaving an intricate web. The caption beneath it read “The Middle East is what meets the eye and much more. A giant web that seems to ensnare us all”.

We have recently been ensnared there three times. As a nation we seem to have no coherent strategy and no real understanding of the culture and the people there. We make the same mistakes over and over and hope the results will be different. I hope we will be smart enough not to get ensnared in this web again. Spiders may seem small, but if we keep flailing around in their webs, we may find that their bites can lead to deadly consequences.

Glenn K. Currie

  

                                                   Entering the Gulf 

The ocean’s surface boiled,

Alive with red sea snakes,

Wildly striking out at

The churning of our wake.

The foam grew thick with blood,

Welling up from below,

Hell’s gates broken open,

Releasing venom’s flow.

These serpents seemed to guard

The entrance to this sea,

Warning those who pass here,

“This blood will flow from thee”.

Suddenly they were gone,

The Persian Gulf lay dead,

Silence like a gunshot,

So quick the vision shed.

The quiet like a veil,

Drawn o’er the Earth and sky,

An eerie, empty mask,

Concealing angry eyes.

The land then came in view,

It’s rage burning the air,

Desert sands spewing flames,

Black blood flowing everywhere.

 

Copyright Glenn K. Currie 2004

 

I write my poetry in a mix of styles depending on the subject matter and the objective. Poetry is a sensory vehicle as well as written words, and the meter and style help create the emotion that the poem elicits.

 

I have received a fair amount of criticism from both sides of the aisle because I choose to write in both rhyme and free verse. There is an active war going on among poets and readers as to what style allows for effective poetry. And for many, you can’t play on both fields.

 

I find that whole discussion confining. Rhyme is a perfect vehicle for humor and also for telling stories and establishing rhythm in poems where it is a useful ingredient. Free verse is very useful to me in dealing with complex subjects where the reader needs to move at his or her own pace and be allowed to float on the thermals of the message.

 

Below is an example of a poem that I chose to write in rhyme because the rhythm helps to establish the tone. “Boxcars” (Riding in Boxcars, 2006), is a poem about building an economy on the backs of the institution of slavery. It is also about the hopelessness that must have weighed so heavily on the victims.

 

The wear and tear on souls seemed best conveyed by the endless rhythm of the trains, chained together, as they rattled through the backyards of our country. Those “Boxcars” seemed a suitable metaphor for the treatment of the slaves who sustained the economy of the south during the first two hundred years of our presence in North America.

 

Glenn K. Currie

Boxcars

 

They rumbled by, chained together,

Dragging each other on worn rails.

Bearing their burdens, noisily,

Steel wheels screeching their sad travails.

 

Plodding slowly through dark alleys,

America’s wealth on their backs,

Weary slaves to the constant beatings,

From long miles of neglected tracks.

 

Boxcars branded by their owners,

Faded claims to these ancient beasts.

Even those outliving masters,

Sold to offspring of the deceased.

 

Old ones left in urban rail yards,

Covertly decked with diff’rent brands,

Graffiti printed on their sides,

The work of sympathetic hands.

 

None escape their endless burdens,

No freedom waits around the bend.

These servants work until they fail,

Chained on rails until journey’s end.

 

Copyright 2006 Glenn K. Currie

 

 

“Wandering in Cemeteries” (Riding in Boxcars, 2006) resulted (surprise) from a walk in a cemetery.

When we are young, we think we have an infinite amount of time. Then suddenly, we’re middle-aged and preparing for retirement. Along the way, we waste the days complaining about what is wrong with a world upon which we have the huge great fortune to be granted a few cosmic moments of occupancy. Or, as I saw this weekend on the part of some teenagers, we spend our time living inside smartphones, video games and computers when a startlingly beautiful world lay just outside the door.

In the end, we all wind up in the same place and wonder what happened.

Perhaps it would be worth considering what might be your regrets, before your history is written in stone?



Wandering in Cemeteries

 Monuments to those,

Who spent their lives

Worrying.

Living in comas.

Hidden now

Beneath the covers.

 

Monuments to those

Who raged inanely.

Angry at the weather,

Or the news.

Passions wasted,

On passing storms.

 

Monuments to those

Burning their lives away

In the furnace

Of somedays.

Ashes carefully saved

In time’s vault.

 

Monuments to those

Seeking immortality.

Striving for greatness,

Interrupted in their quest.

Their only mantles,

The first snow.

 

A city of souls,

Filled with regrets.

Unfinished stories,

Written in stone.

Read by those

Wandering in cemeteries

 

This is something new I have been working on. From time to time I will be showing the other nine parts of "Breakfast Chronicles".
Please let me know what you think?
I am doing this one first because I ran into someone (hi Collin) who is also familiar with Pasqual's and has enjoyed it's great morning ambience.

 

III. Breakfast at Pasqual’s (Santa Fe)

 

Table for Ten walked in at eight fifteen.

The small room was transformed.

Sleepy couples sipping coffee were suddenly awake.

The group fed off itself while waiting to be fed.

Tourists huddled at the edges of the place,

Settling silently among the T-shirts for sale,

Seeking to blend into the colors of chilis and pop art.

Table for Ten was the local’s heartbeat,

Where huevos rancheros came to rest.

They pulled up the shades,

Letting the morning sun

Fill the dark corners.

And with their laughter and biting commentary,

Announced the birth of the day.

 

 

This is part of a long poem titled “Breakfast Chronicles” that includes observations of ten interesting restaurants around the country. Breakfast places are particularly intriguing to me because they are an opportunity to see people in the early morning light, before they have a chance to put on their game faces. This poem is protected under copyright to Glenn K. Currie and has not yet been published other than in my blog.

 

Gettysburg

 

When you visit the battlefields at Gettysburg, you can hear them speak to you.

 The spirits still occupy this place. After the battles and the heavy rain, came the heat and the dust and the "reaping" of the fields: 8,000 dead soldiers, over 40,000 total casualties, 3,000 plus dead animals (mostly mules and horses). But no amount of physical restoration could change the fact that a city of lost souls was indelibly etched into the earth.

 
The world changed in those days after the conflict, and the drum beats that led away from the battlefields are leading us still.

The spirits, however, stayed. They are there to tell us what they gave to help our country begin to find itself. Blue and gray, brothers all, lay in carnage so great, that our country finally began to seek a peace with itself.

If you stand in the fields and listen to the whispers in the gentle breeze, you can hear their story.

 

I wrote the poem Gettysburg (In the Cat's Eye, 2009) in an effort to try to capture those whispers and the quiet "tat-tat" of the drums that were slowly leading us in the long journey to the present. 

Glenn K. Currie

Gettysburg

Distant drum beats

Floated in the heat.

Tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat,

 Softly fell

Like tear drops,

Among the lost souls

Adrift in this vale

Of silent hearts.

 

Trampled grass

Gathered itself,

And slowly rose

From the earth.

Blood-stained and burned,

Kneeling in dazed confusion,

It quietly cradled

The blues and grays.

 

 

Reapers moved hesitantly,

Picking the harvest.

Uneasy in the presence

Of the spirits

Rising to the drumbeats call.

Tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat,

Whispered the gentle breeze,

As it gathered up the dust.

 

 

In 1986, I travelled in Saudi Arabia with members of a business roundtable. Two of our members were former Ambassadors and, through their connections with the King and Crown Prince, we were given the opportunity to visit a seldom-seen abandoned city in the desert east of Mecca and Medina. It is very similar in style to the ruins at Petra in Jordan and may well have been built by the same civilization. It was a stop on the ancient trade routes that carried goods across the Arabian Peninsula.

 

Meda’in Saleh is an impressive sight, rising up out of the desert. The buildings were all carved by slaves out of rock mountains and huge standing boulders. Many slaves probably spent their lives carving these structures.

 

As we walked among these ruins, I felt a strange attachment to the place…like I had been there before. I wondered if there might be some truth to the idea that we all have lived past lives.

 

When I returned home, I wrote the poem  Past Lives  which was published in Riding in Boxcars in 2006. There is also a photo there of one of these ruins.

 

The voices that spoke to me that day in Saudi Arabia did not speak of easy lives. If there is any truth to the view of reincarnation, most of us would have spent our past lives as slaves or victims of the many wars that have comprised much of the history of our civilizations.

 

Freedom has come slowly to the world and at a costly price. And even when some of us finally were able to rise from a sea of subjugation and became rulers of our individual worlds, it was easy to see it all disappear again.

 

I realized that all of those who came before, whether they were slave, soldier, mother, father, rebel, ruler, black or white, helped define who I am today. The voices that spoke to me that day in the desert were part of me, either through my genes…or, perhaps, through a soul that has been reborn from the blender of past lives.

Glenn K. Currie

 

Past Lives

 

I helped build the pyramids,

And died beneath one.

Bore a child,

On the Plains of Abraham,

And was lost in the desert.

 

I was buried in a mass grave,

That fertilized the cotton fields,

Of the South.

And I rejoiced

In the Resurrection.

 

I shed my blood for my enemies,

Grew old while growing young.

Sank into the sea,

And rose again,

In a sharks mouth.

 

I ruled the world,

Was betrayed by a friend,

Touched the edge of the universe,

From a black hole,

And then began again.

Just an added note on the last post. I used a photo for Sniper that shows a lone hawk circling lazily against a background of storm clouds. He searches for victims, like any good sniper. The photo of this one is on my website. www.snapscreenpress.com.
Glenn

 Sniper is a first place prize winner that I wrote a few years ago and published in my third collection of poetry, In the Cat's Eye in 2009. 

Is it about the shooter or the victim?

Or is it about a world where life and death blend so seamlessly that the clockwork silver of the universe beckons us slowly into the darkness, picking us off one by one, even as we huddle in the Earth's gentle shadows.

You'll have to decide about this one yourself.

Sniper

 

I lay among silver daffodils

Watching the Bear mark time

On the luminous dials spinning above.

I wondered what colors would emerge

In a world without light.

A breeze picked its way through the field,

Found me tucked in the shadows,

And began a gentle massage.

Crickets ticked away the minutes,

Moving to the Earth’s beat.

I knew the sun would be too slow

To paint the daffodils yellow,

So I closed my eyes and painted them

Red.

For my blog:

I wrote the poem Charleston-1969 because I was fascinated with the way the city seemed to live in two different worlds. It is a beautiful place, physically, with buildings that capture the splendor of the ante-bellum years, and yet it also seemed to have trouble giving up the failed philosophy that brought so much shame and pain in more recent years. It was a city with one foot on the pier and the other on the boat. In 1969 there were still white and black toilets and drinking fountains. Prejudice could be displayed fairly freely by some, and a favorite comment, mostly in jest, was “the south will rise again”. The schizophrenia that pervaded the city had existed for over a century and left it still lost in its attempt to adjust to a new world.

Charleston lost much in the war. Its leadership, so eager for the beginning at Fort Sumter, had never truly found a way to cope with the end, and the resulting devastation of its culture and the holes left in so many families.

In 1969 the city seemed to still be dealing with some of these issues. It was a living remnant of a war that changed us all.

The photo I used with this poem in “In the Cat’s Eye”, showed a field of flowers, sharply divided between red and white except for one yellow blossom encroaching into the field of white. It seemed an appropriate representation of a beautiful city still trying to find itself over a hundred years later.

 

Glenn K. Currie 

 

 

Charleston-1969

 

The earth had split apart.

All who stood at the edge

Fell into the abyss.

Fires burned everywhere,

Fanned by oratory

Puffing black powder.

 

Cities and farms emptied,

To feed the holocaust.

Fields grew human wheat.

Musket balls and cannon

Harvested the fruit

Of the planters.

 

The smoke still blows here,

In this world of black and white.

One hundred years of ash

Drift against the walls

Of a reconstructed city

Built on crumbling foundations.

 

 

 

 

One of the things I am going to do with this blog is to talk a little about some of my poems. Today I am going to focus on a poem that was published in Riding in Boxcars back in 2006.

 

Navy Swim Call-1966 was written to try to capture the feelings of many of us who were caught up in the Vietnam War. I had been in the West Pacific on a cruise as a midshipman when the Gulf of Tonkin incident broke out in 1964 and almost wound up there early. I knew from the date of my graduation from Dartmouth in 1965 that I would eventually wind up in that conflict. This poem seemed an apt description of the way many of us felt as we waited for our orders to go there. We could see the acceleration in the war efforts and could feel the country beginning to be dragged down into the depths.

 

The feeling I had swimming in the Indian Ocean in 10,000 feet of water seemed to reflect the fears of the unseen monsters that might lie in wait for all of us in the future. The world was changing and the country and the military seemed ill-equipped to deal with what lay ahead. We were living in a mirage and the sailors and soldiers were the bait fish that were being used by the politicians to accomplish broader objectives. Their tentacles were reaching up to drag us under in a conflict that was played on game boards in Washington and Russia and China and would soon drag us all into the darkness.

 

Regards,

Glenn

    

 

Navy Swim Call- 1966

 

The ship rested like a mirage,

In the Indian Ocean.

Letting its swimmers,

Test Poseidon’s patience.

 

We dove in noisily,

A school of bait fish, splashing.

Trading equatorial heat,

For the ocean’s cool glare.

 

The shark boats sobered us,

Their presence ominous.

Rifles manned by poor marksmen,

We hoped would not be tested.

 

I floated, nervously.

Bravado fading.

Two miles above the ocean floor,

Invading an alien world.

 

The black cold beneath,

Snaked its way up my legs,

Sending tentacles along my spine.

Awakening primal fears.

 

Someone, perhaps making a wish,

Threw a nickel, flashing silver.

It twisted and turned,

Reaching back for the light.

 

I watched it fade away,

Disappearing slowly.

Beginning its long journey,

From sunshine to darkness.

 

As I swam back,

Through waves rolling out of Asia,

I wondered if I too,

Would soon sink into the abyss.