Chiara Taylor (Year 12IB) composed this poem after studying extracts taken from T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
Chiara (like Eliot) has applied a rich array of modernist devices: sudden shifts of perspective, montage and intertextuality in effort to capture something of the zeitgeist of our times.
Thank you Chiara for letting us share this poem with the wider school community.
Eliotesque poem
Fly high little blue bird, away
From the terrors of expectations, closer
To tranquillity and mindfulness, come
Plant your roots in this crystal water, bathe
And be reborn in a splendid spring, welcome
A more content and stable you, forget
Being consumed with hate and vengeance, grieve
Those who died a worthy cause, aid
Those who fight for another day, pray
That the gods will descend, fight
For a stranger’s survival.
For you never know how quickly your heartbeat could fade into desolate numbness.
Never ending torture, struggling for air, gasping with deep raspy breaths.
Nothing.
No release, no silence, no answers.
I spend many days pondering reasons for existence in a world dominated by greed,
I look at nature and am entranced by its beauty,
I see the blossoming trees with their
Juicy fruits and prosperous seeds.
I envision white mountains covered in snow
Then the wind picks up and starts to blow.
A whirlwind of powder so light and cold
the faintest touch could change its mould.
All magic, pure magic. Vanished, gone,
A faint memory in the distance, that’s all it was.
Now in its place, a comedy movie,
watched by naïve little children,
woodland is burning, smog is settling,
Rhinos are bleeding, bombs are exploding,
Babies are crying, ice is melting…
The world is pleading, yet change is impossible, and humans are confusing.
What collection of muddled thoughts pass in another?
What possesses one to kill? Or do an injustice?
Is war a collection of confusions mixed with misunderstanding?
Is corruption just a conundrum in exile, sectioned off to be sent to the shredder?
‘An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind’
Only short is the amount of time before the world turns into pieces belonging to an expired puzzle.
A Malaga beauty,
On a summer’s eve,
The swarm of tourists now dispersing,
A pale green bottle glistening in the sunlight stays.
An intriguing item left by a nameless being.
Seconds, minutes, hours, and days, it’s planted in the sand.
Hundreds of different shapes pass by, not one taking a second glance.
Until the last glance ever was made,
12:37pm,
A subtle wave comes and drags it away.
Floating, drifting, rolling, sinking.
A pea drowning in a messy basin, the plug nowhere to be found.
I watch as it winds its way, a zig-zag, moving slowly to the bottom,
Nestling under a rock as though it would never come above the surface again.
But how could it? There were no fins, or arms, or flippers to help it.
Alone it was, in an ocean, filled with menacing creatures.
I turn around, each step, further away yet never close.
Goodbye my green friend!
A shooting star,
A rocket,
An asteroid,
A meteorite.
A little girl watches, a fire soars past, far away, up into the unreachable,
blazing towards constellations, the big dipper, the north star,
other patterns of light interpreted though different eyes.
Faster and Faster it gets, almost as bright as the Moon now.
‘mama, will it hit the moon?’,
The night stays quiet, mouths gaping the size of giant saucers,
Dull murmurs incomprehensible over the loud silence,
A revolutionary object the gods created.
How did they do it?
A catastrophic explosion would result if it were piercing the air south,
Yet, by some fate, some spirit, humankind is spared.
Why?
What deeply deserving action has caused this revelation?
We will never know
For it is a creation of the gods
Whom we will never ask.