Made by Hand

Oct 15 2011

Get a hobby, I was told.

All successful people

have one.

It will do you good

make you less morose.

Music, though, would offend the neighbours,

the painful strains

of the tortured viola.

And art seems a waste

  —  really, is there anything left to paint?

So I thought about things made by hand.

Of the pleasure

of esoteric knowledge,

of immersing myself

in something small.

Like bee-keeping, brick-laying

messing about with wood

   — the satisfaction

of mastery

over the physical world.

So far, my hobbies consist

of cataloguing life’s minor annoyances.

Firing-off

letters to the editor,

that must have got lost in the mail.

Leaving stale crusts

on the deck

for hungry squirrels.

Which they’ve now come to expect,

busily chattering

with a vaguely threatening edge.

Trouble is, the older I get

there’s less and less

that interests me.

Even sex

has withered.

And young people

fail to impress

  —  the age-old lament

of successive generations.

While my so-called contemporaries

endlessly kvetch

about the expected infirmities

pension cheques.

So I have settled on poetry,

which no one reads

and keeps me from feeling my age.

Or at least as young as all that verse

stuffed into bottom drawers,

in adolescent journals

angst-filled

lovelorn.

Some have mistaken this

for autobiography,

my ill-tempered rants

for disappointments past.

But as poetry, my annoyance ascends

to the lofty status of art

  —  embellishment, and fakery

disguised as creativity,

the artful lie.

Yet no less substantial

than brick and wood,

honey from my own backyard.

The artisanal,

things made by hand.

That may even out-last

us all.

I think the immortal Winston Churchill not only painted, but also layed bricks and raised bees. Perhaps that's why this unlikely assortment of potential hobbies came to mind. He was a great wordsmith, of course; but as far as I know, more adept at prose than poetry.