“Corragio” — My old friend said. / And then he put / the gun to his head. / That’s what it took / to blunt the pain / with a hunk of lead. / It’s no walk in the park. / The night is cold, / and my friend is dead.
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Interesting poem. For what it’s worth, in German the word for courage is Mut—pronounced Moot. Sort of fits the meaning of the poem.
I hope that linguistic coincidence deepens the meaning of the poem, which I hope is not moot (or misunderstood).
It deepens the meaning, in the sense of a sort of punning, Joycean, multi-lingual dream-language. Something about how all human endeavor is futile, even courage being slag in the end. I sense that NOM understood that all art is an expression of human frailty, that it is exactly the ephemerality of art that gives it its meaning. But then, he’d probably laugh at my over analysis…
There is also the tyranny of rhyme, which makes everything suspect.
Who cares if singing is always suspect? What else can we do? Said, head, lead, dead. Slag, bag.
This from a reader:
“Bill O’s comment … as always to the very point … George Braque, a year before his death (in 1962), said:
“You see I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence — what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.”
Amen to that.