A Sonnet from the Glass Kitchen

"my poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered”—Taliesin, “Preiddeu Annwfn” (“The Spoils of Annwfn”), Wales, sixth century CE

Taliesin may be a remembered dream,

fishing his poems from a hot tureen,

supported by no planking, joist, or beam,

his transcendental cooktop can’t be seen;

but upright apes’ geese are cooked too,

even Napoleon, smart-ass pundits say,

n’a jamais existé, and poor I and you

are feeble fictions who’ll melt away

leaving no tidbits on the tray unless, booked

in some latter-day bardic sort of way,

our happenstance mythology is well cooked

up and in the end somehow turns out OK.

Poets fritter away in forts of frosted glass.

That’s how “iconic” figures come to pass.

--Peter Dreyer

Note: Taliesin’s surviving fragment says enigmatically, “Beyond the Glass Fortress they did not see”; https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/preiddeu-annwn

Lines Prompted by N. P. van Wyk Louw’s “Ballad of the Drinker in His Pub”*

You sat drinking Castle beer, quart by quart,

with rugby droning on the radio,

in the Café Royal, while out in the road,

all afternoon the sun declined, sinking

in the former world, already dead, times

“finish en klaar,” as they put it now, brained

by the Broederbond’s sempiternal crap,

then drowned in the ANC’s fraternal privy.

Behind the bar the bottles gleam in rows;

how predictably red the barman’s nose—

but random rhymes are not what I propose:

History doesn’t repeat itself, it scans;

in Parliament, not quite across the street,

they make new plans for parallels to meet.

*“Die Ballade van die Drinker in Sy Kroeg” is the Afrikaans title. In common South African parlance, mixing up the languages, as people like to do, “finish en klaar” means “finished and done with.”

99.83%

"Prehistory is estimated to account for 99.83 percent of the time humans have been on Earth.”—news report

That leaves only .17%

for everything since the beginning

of recorded time,

including all of yours and mine.

In the long millennia of the 99.83,

we were crafted into what we had to be.

Inevitability?

If you think so, fine.