Tag Archives: trust

Sing, Then: a cyhydedd hir

To fill life with song,
sing out all day long
both right notes, and wrong;
do not be shy.

Don’t worry the notes.
Just listen, and quote;
and do keep your throat
from getting dry.

The subject, the text?
The world, more or less;
what small things impress
you, just sing about.

Don’t keep it inside;
set it free to glide
out into the wide
world. Go on, shout!

04 MAY 2011

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Big Fish

What makes up a community,
if not those common threads
that make us not such strangers
and more interested, instead,

in how the other sees the world,
what makes a good friend tick.
To share the things that shape your life:
that’s what makes friendship stick.

And who need know out and beyond
some wide, imagined fence,
besides the ones whose words you trust
with your experience?

If the result is my small pond
should teem with such big fish
that my wee boat seems less alone:
for what more could I wish?

09 APR 2006

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On the Incredulous

Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.

Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas — both false — can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in Musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a goot beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

— Umberto Eco, from Foucault’s Pendulum

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Primary Colors

You can’t trust the politicians,
but they’re really not to blame
’cause we give them what they work with,
handing over without shame

all the best of our intentions
and worst of our desires,
all the evils we won’t mention
but that honesty requires.

So in every politician,
there’s a bit of you and me;
they do try to represent us
and they do, to some degree:

all the quick conclusions
and the power we adore,
all the easiest solutions
that end in poverty and war.

There are some good politicians,
but they don’t stay good for long
because who they represent is us
and we are often wrong:

all the selfish motives
and all the foolish pride.
All the general vote is
is picking for your side.

09 SEP 2003

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