Coral Days Are Here Again
Rediscovered in my ‘time capsule’ of olden day stuff. Rewritten, it seems to me to be more apt today than it did when I was younger (and in similar rage!)
Coral days are here again.
The blood-red gouge
is softened,
the cacophony of traffic
is dampened,
and the dirt is swept
out of sight.
What was bad, what was feared,
is wallpapered
right over.
The bizarre, the downright weird,
given soft light.
The impending
is re-timed.
Coral coloured spectacles
tinted the pink
of roses
spread thinly over the masses
via TV.
While what passes
stays unseen.
Stay put. Stay right where you are.
Yours is to earn the Dollar;
give all your blood –
for the wars,
and the Bankers.
Down-trod classes
paying fees.
Bow down, genuflect the knees.
Exchange your pleasure for guilt.
Tremble before
your elected –
you know your place!
But look upward
there are stars!
Coral days are here again.
This took me a few minutes to realise what you meant, but when I got it, I felt that old familiar feeling — we are living in a kind of congenial 1984
Unlike my father and his father I was spared the experience of war (Harold Wilson my Hero and saviour)
However, I did have to live my teen years under constant concern about the threat of being vapourised.
(Makes the Covid threat seem a bit tame.)
Thank you kindly for the reading and the comment, Guaj. Appreciated – especially as you fathomed it out a bit in your mind too. 😉 I have a sort of blindness to ‘stress’. Oh, I suffer from it, don’t get me wrong! But during it, I don’t seem to recognise it and what it is doing to me. I too lived with the fear of the bomb and nuclear war. What did it do to me? What has any of it done to me? I don’t think I really could really identify a single consequence, but that is life isn’t… Read more »
Yes we are a product of thing we endured, but I’m not sure the past is unchangeable. Certainly the likes of Franco and Stalin didn’t think so. 🙂 During the Cuba missile crisis I was too young and naive to take advantage, but the girls were saying things like ‘I don’t want to die a virgin’. Certainly it seems to me the hippie movement took off due to the potential of early death. I thank Harold Wilson, not because of his politics, but because he turned down the invitation to join the party in Vietnam. Pity Mr. Blair didn’t have… Read more »
Funny, that: I didn’t want to die a virgin, either. I think all the girls knew that. 😉
I just was too conservative to get on with caftans and bells on chains. I know now I missed out as a consequence, but too late… unless I do a bit of quantum dimensional jumping. God the mind boggles!
Yes. The division of society. Divide and conquor? Certainly the plan from the man in Moscow methinks. As I was just saying to Guaj ^ we are moulded by our experiences, and I personally can’t identify what, when, and how I’ve been changed: Not really. I just roll on gathering the detritus and dust that is in my path! I guess how we are effected mentally depends too upon how we are at the beginning of the experience. I hope that doesn’t sound that I take the suffering that some people are experiencing in anything but a serious and compassionate… Read more »
how is this not nibbed yet? I absolutely adored especially this:
What was bad, what was feared,
is wallpapered
right over.
The bizarre, the downright weird,
given soft light.
The impending
is re-timed.
Thank you, Nicoletta, I am delighted that you enjoyed this. You are very generous with your appraisal.
Allen
x
lots of deep sentiment here and very good word-choice, it’s not that you wrote what you felt but rather felt what you wrote, the impact on a reader therefore is amplified.