Broadcaster, critic, author & poet Clive James who is terminally ill has written a wonderful new poem - Return of the Kagorah Kid - published in this week's New Statesman magazine. James came from the Sydney suburb of Kagorah but has lived in the UK for most of his life. He is now too ill to return home but hopes that his ashes might be scattered in Sydney Harbour and maybe his poem put on a plaque there.
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| Clive James |
In our desperate, shallow, violent and clamorous world where sound bites, profanities, drivel, text speak and tasteless hyperbole fills our media and the minds of so many we are increasingly becoming unable to discriminate the good and the worthwhile from the dross and the banal. Millions, apparently, think that people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are worthy of support to hold great offices of state in their respective nations; untold millions across the world see the acquisition of an i-phone or a Pokemon game as a desirable goal; and yet more millions see a selfie picture or a tattoo as high art. In a world increasingly populated by unthinking, uncaring, dumbed down and trivial Homer Simpson clones hooked on reality TV, Strictly Come Dancing, and the celebrity culture, mankind's awareness of his basic humanity and spiritual dimension are being obliterated from human comprehension; we are in danger of losing our very souls. James' glorious, simple, and yet profound reflection and use of English is not only a clarion call to us all of the important, worthy and good things of life but a quiet reminder of all that it is to be human:
Return of the Kagorah Kid
Here I began and here I reach the end.
From here my ashes go back to the sea
And take my memories of every friend
And love, and anything still dear to me,
Down to the darkness out of which the sun
Will rise again, this splendour never less:
Fated to be, when all is said, and done,
For others to recall and curse or bless
The way that time runs out but still comes in,
The new tide always ready to begin.
Do the gulls cry in triumph, or distress?
In neither, for they cry because they must,
Not knowing this is glory, unaware
Their time will come to leave it. It is just
That we, who learned to breath the brilliant air,
And first were told that we were made of dust
Here in this city, yet went out across
The globe to find fame, should return one day
To trade our gains against a certain loss –
And sink from sight where once we sailed away.
Clive James
Click on the link to hear Clive James recite his poem: http://bbc.in/2ail6mj
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