Tags
Britain, British, Gulliver's Travels, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, postmodern, satire
GULLIVER REVISITED
like that doubting-Thomas
Bishop before me
not a single
word of it
did I believe
an island
turned so Lilliputian
(but talking heads swelling
so Gargantuan)
as the oceans rose
it got sucked beneath
but where
was all that buoyancy?
what had happened
to that huge frivolity (native
laughter of the land),
that joie de vivre?
how could that be simply
pumped out, as if it
were untreated effluent,
world’s
worst substance
onto the beaches
and out to sea
Oh we laughed at
this crazy cleric getting
the better of the bishop
penning a fable
that points to all of us
we are
all castaways now,
swept up upon the wild,
wild currents of
our time
dumped on
strange, exaggerated shores