Here's a thing. I was searching for another topic in my old blog posts and found what I'll repost here.
I was going through older posts, and found two poems, I thought at the time I'd written them in the mid-1980s but I recall writing Smokey's Lament just after my gap years which would make that one written in the late 1970s. And Sing A Song Of Chaos was written within a year.
I was backtracking to see how far back I could verify my TEdALOG Lite / TEdALOG Lite II blog series. I found a text dump of a blog that I'd written on my PC (in HTML, no less, and using Notepad) and uploaded with some software that arranged and linked it and then wrote the whole shebang to a website of your choice, and thus includes the earliest blog post I still have records of.
These were posts from late 2003 to late 2006. Everything earlier (and done completely manually before 2003) was lost when the web provider I'd been using before 2003 went belly-up. That would have been from 1997 - 2003 and the blog was called TEdLIVISION!!! as a nod to my BBS I ran before that.
But it establishes TEdALOG as being at least 20 years old, with a name change to TEdALOG Lite II in January 2007. And if I ever find my earlier blog on the
Anyway - here, with no apologies and no expectations - are some poems that had to be written by a guy in his mid-20s and the blog post he wrote with them in his 40s:
Poems Across The Decades.
As we were selling up and moving house, I went through many many boxes of my father's possessions, airing out a lot of it and seeing what's there. Two sheets of paper fell out of one book, written on my old dot matrix printer, and turned out to be copies of poems I'd written in the mid 80's. I think I have second sight...
SMOKEY'S LAMENT
Smokey the bear went out one day,
Found a six lane carriageway,
Saw the cars belch fumes and soot,
People competing to pollute!
Something welled in Smokey's eye,
A bitter tear, he wiped it dry . . .
How long can we do it, this rape of the soil,
This searching and striving for land to despoil?
How long can we pillage the trees of this land,
Before we fall victim to our own wanton hand?
Silting the rivers with algae and spill,
How long before we must swallow this pill?
Smokey the bear turned aside for the city,
Sad there was the Earth, and the more was his pity,
Covered in concrete, entombed in highrise,
Cloud of pollution was hiding the skies,
Coughing and stumbling and hiding his tears,
Smokey resolved not to come back for years.
Kill the damn bugs, for the ruin our hay!
Curse them with sprays for they get in our way!
Coursing their ways through the Earth's veins they ran,
Now in us all, every child, woman, man!
Salt in the tillage, a new man-disease,
We've forsaken the land and raped her of trees!
Smokey the bear turned his steps to the West,
To places which once were with native life blest,
Found only farms, all sterile and bare,
Rusting machines - man must once have been there.
Bowed now and weeping and heavy of heart,
To the wide oceans did Smokey make start.
Full of our excrement, turgid and green,
The results of the Exxon Valdeez were here seen,
(yes I added these verses when reprinting it for Dad, in 1990.)
And great were the fishes that died in the net,
And great were the whales (what was left of them yet)
Lifeless, the reefs and the corals as one,
Nature again has by man been undone.
Smokey the bear thought he knew of a place,
Safe, and so far from our human deathrace,
Made for the east, for the rainforests there,
(Arrived just as we laid the last acre bare)
Heavy of heart now and laden with doubt,
Smokey the bear booked a fare to the South . . .
"Here in Antarctica, surely," thought he,
"I will no more of this man-folly see?"
Alas - that which greeted him, ugly and dusty,
Was campsites abandoned, boats, reefed and rusty,
And with horror he noticed his blistering skin,-
No-one had told him the ozone was thin . . .
Smokey the bear asked the Lord for one boon,
And so, in a thrice, had set sail for the Moon,
But space debris Got in his way,
Up there, where Killer Sputniks prey,
And on the Moon too We'd left our traces,
Pitted robots andRocket cases . . .
And so on he continued, he's gone off to see,
If somewhere there might be a sane galaxy,
We're left here to face this our pell-mell race,
To make amends to our birthing-place.
Such a beautiful world that we treated unfair,-
And now without Smokey, what hope is there?
SING A SONG OF CHAOS
Sing a song of Chaos, Entropy reversed,
New and strange attractors,
In the mind are nursed.
Mindful of another verse, I can but watch and frown -
It looks just like "Atishoo!
We all fall down..."
Ere I wake this morning, Before I end my sleep,
I pray to have a gentle dream,
A treasure I can keep.
No more nuclear nightmare, Frightening to my rest,
Please not another forest raped,
With axe and chainsaw "blest!"
Want to dream of pastures green, Not razed by 2-4-T,
Please - show me a verdant place,
Where in dreams I can be.
Let me look on fish and whales, At play in waters blue,
Don't show me an albatross,
Dying in black goo!
Let me roam a mountain range, Not opencut collier's pit,
I want to swim on beaches clean,
Not have dodge through shit!
Oh Progress, you are wonderful, You fill me with such dread,
You've stuffed a lovely planet
Now you're starting on my head . . .
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