Here
amongst this august gathering, or should I say, April gathering, of
bards and bardettes, this vernal gorsedd, I feel somewhat like a Big
Issue seller at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, or like a eunuch in a
brothel - a little impotent, if not impudent, as one might say.
I
am told that I would not recognise poetry if it climbed into a four
ton truck and drove over me. This is probably true. My voice does not
spin and turn with precise metre, would not know assonance from
alliteration, or an ass from a donkey if it comes to that; it does
not dance and sing with neat back-bent devices or concealed conceits,
it is totally and completely prosaic; it is, to put it bluntly,
pedestrian.
But
there is a poetry that I do know. The poetry of sunrises and sunsets.
The poetry of a dancing waterfall full bursting with spring spate; of
a bird sudden on the wing; of a quiet settled on a valley, or the
burst of a wave on a rock. The poetry of a moment of kindness, or of
a smile spreading over a face. The poetry of a look in a lover's eye,
or of a workman stepped back from his job when he knows it is well
done. These each and every one is a poem written well with the
deepest of words, if we do but read them.
'Tis
said that an April fool was one who still believed that the year
began on April the first when it had been moved to January; one who
cannot see what is now so, one who does not know what counts as the
truth when the truth is shifted by fashion, or by trickery, by decree
or by guile, by stealth or by design, by fraud or by usurpation,
which is why we trick and fool them, to show their gullibility and
our wit and nous by contrast.
I
may not have the wit to know what it is fashionable to say, or the
nous to know when to be quiet and so hide my ignorance of the correct
pose or forms to adopt; but then I am a fool, a fool besotted by
life's deeper words, by that poetry of time and place, of accident
and incident, of life's hapenstance and life's irreverence of our
intentions. I stand nothing but a fool perplexed and confused, made
the fool indeed by life's deeper words, too often deaf to the songs
it sings - and that makes me truly an April fool.