The Scales of Justice
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| Lady Justice, by Mimi |
Posted by Jeremy Dyer
The beauty of the rose
Is balanced by the thorn
That's the way the story goes,
Right from the day you're born.
No fields of joy without an end
No Christmas cracking time
No party day around the bend
To look back on your prime.
On the other schizo hand
My childhood wasn't bad
Or so the therapist said
When he held my hand.
Eons ago the lords of glory
Ruled the righteous earth.
Now a twisted murder story
Tells us what we're worth.
They say a cynic's never wrong
He can't be disappointed.
But is his view a correct sum
Of what life has anointed?
Shatter me in your eyes
Consume me with your lips
Find me love that never dies
That's not from movie clips.
Am I happy? What a question!
Please don't query life's direction.
Is it fate or circumstance,
Or am I my own providence?
Am I trapped or am I free?
Am I the me I want to be?
The urgent answer that we seek
Won't be on tv this week.
4 comments:
What if the ‘beauty of the rose’ were not ‘balanced by the thorn’? Didn’t Darwinian nature create the thorn (prickle) in the role of Praetorian Guard, to (nobly!!) protect the vulnerable bloom? So borrowing your metaphor, Jeremy: with the bloom and thorn as presumed counterpoints, what if there were no ‘on the other hand’? Where all questions, without exception, had just one answer, without exception. And in every instance an obvious answer, to boot. Life would be monochromatic, monophonic, monorhythmic — in short, monotonous. Worse, no dichotomy of ideas in mining for truth: No ‘either-or’, no ‘neither-nor’, no ‘if this, then that’, no ‘but what if’. No point-counterpoint to contemplate; no countervailing offset to ideas of greater or equal or lesser force. That is, no ‘what ifs.’ All of this about ‘what ifs?’ and ‘on the other hand’ — placed in the imagery, again, of the poem’s opening metaphor — why not, then, welcome the ‘beauty of the [noble] thorn’?
I think life is made of contrasts...
"Am I trapped or am I free?"
Sounds like existentialism, to me!
Well, yes, it seems that our lives have lost an intangible grandeur. Everything has been reduced. Not that we would want to go back to the past, but I doubt that anyone would want to go back to the present.
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