Joe wrote:
>Lenses: A Love Song for Salman Rushdie
>
>We are wanderers all
>In the shapeshifting dunes of our days
>Seeking amidst the sandstorms
>The sight of a sheltered course
>So we sift our pasts to cast our futures
>And grind lenses to focus our lives.
>Most are less than original
>But each has its own eccentricities
>Fitted for one eye, one terrain;
>No lens is universal, and no path.
>
>Most of us hide our quirks of vision
>>From others, and even from ourselves
>Lest some fatal slip should betray us
>And hew to some hard line or other
>Packed by souls of similar stripe
>Who confuse the safety of numbers
>With the security of a way well chosen
>And who, fearing the very existence
>Of the walkers of other ways
>As challenges to their own decisions' wisdom
>Strive to herd those they _must_ consider misled
>Back to the 'proper' route, or failing that
>Seek to end their journeys.
>
>But some crazed few of us
>Too honest for our own damned good
>Craft our lenses from every gritty grain
>Of the wide beach of experience
>Fusing them carefully in insight's crucible
>Until they crystallize clean and true
>And then we wave them radiantly
>Before the wandering world.
>
>These folks or followed, or killed, or both.
>Poets and messiahs are the glaziers
>Of living visions, and well wrought lenses
>May powerfully concentrate the common gaze
>Promisisng pathfinding clarity.
> But- remember this:
>Art is metaphor, and metaphors are chameleons.
>They are colored by our journeys
>As surely as they shape them.
>Empty and aimless are those who lack lenses
>If such pathless ones exist
>But stumbling blind are those who
>Given the lenses of others
>Wear them as if they were windowpanes
>And polish them not with their lives.
Wow!!! That's really beautiful, Joe. I'm quite impressed. (And I think Salman would be too.) You write wonderfully.
>Want more?
Yeah! Keep `em comin'!
-Prof. Tim