Pure Whimsy (Poems by Neil Stewart McLeod Book 6)

 

Poems by Neil Stewart McLeod Vol. 6. Here with an introduction by Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, is a collection of surprising perspectives crisply encased in verse. Included are  “Getting Back On Track”, “Grand Ma’s Smile”, “Vanishing Wisdom” and “Romance of Writing” with over thirty other poems. Time and experience are captured through the author’s lens. “The poet,” wrote Aristotle, “like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects—things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.”  He believed that all operations of human reason seek truth, and he saw poetry as a powerful kind of truth seeking.  A verse can show us the world.  It can, like the poems of Neil McLeod, lead us to laugh and to muse.


Available on Amazon


Getting Back On Track

You can’t be tying a string around your finger

Every time you have to remember

Why it is you went into the kitchen,

Or what it was you came into the garage for anyway.


You stand in front of the fridge,

In a room cluttered with thousands of memory joggers-

A block of carving knives, that lasting gift from your wedding,

The painted rose on a plate from a grateful patient,

A colonial tea canister from Williamsburg

With a key to stop its contents being purloined,

And the gallery of photographs held by magnets on the door,


And it is as if you were gazing at some rebuilt city,

Which has been completely redesigned

After an atomic bomb has wiped

All the definitive land marks off the map,

Wondering why you are there,

And what pressing task,

Which was screaming for attention,

Caused you to sleepwalk,

And if the telltale signs of senility

Are already devastating your mind.


Then picking your way back to the bathroom

You peer into the mirror

Straining for the clue,

And with an Archimedean exaltation,

Discover the switch of memory

And reluctantly admitting your humanity,

Put your day back on track once more. 



On Apple Music



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