April Fool

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.