Posted by Ron Price on May 24, 19104 at 04:48:02:
LIKE THE WIND
Edward Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason that he became an historian: to see a pattern in what might otherwise appear from a distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory experiences. -Georges May, “Autobiography and the 18th Century”, The Author in His Work, L. Martz, editor, Yale UP, 1978, p.325.
Poets, like everyone else, can rarely be absolutely sure that they are in the right place at the right time, but they often possess an uncanny feeling that this place and this event was meant for them alone. Poetry seems the best way, the only deep and slightly magical way, to convey this uniqueness, this impor- tance, this very individual experience. -Ron Price with thanks to David Bronwich, A Choice of Inheri- tance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost, Harvard UP, London, 1989, p.215.
Now that these days of running1 stop
and I can sit and feel the years gone by
like some great theatre and stage where
a great drama did enact itself before my
eyes. I played the part with all the force
of energy and will that I could muster
and so win the part and live to play the
role again, and yet again, until I felt as
if the part had become a “me”, some
prototype for a time and age now gone
and noone knew for I did not tell, but
was silent when at centre stage I told
and told and told of this wondrous tale2
in such a way that the wind blew gently
and the sun shone on and on and I, too,
travelled on and on and blew like the wind.
Ron Price
25 September 1996
1these days of running are the days I work as a lecturer/teacher/co-ordinator of programs in a Tafe/Community college. This poem was written as a two week holiday is about to begin.
2 this ‘tale’, the centre of the greatest drama in the world’s spiritual history, I have been telling for a period of nearly forty years.
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