A poem - Stand Up To Fear

 My photo of a statue in The Abbey Gardens at Malmesbury taken on a recent holiday. Do you know this garden was featured on TV as the home of "the naked gardener". Everyone wore clothes on thte day we were there however.



I seem to have come to another halt with new poetry at the moment, however this is one which I did not post on this blog when it was first written, this seems to be an oversight since I am quite proud of this one.

very much darker than  my usual output but all the better for that; "a change is as good as a rest", they say. Read below how it came about.

STAND UP TO FEAR

Fear assails me

Analysing my body

with frigid hands

Fear disrupts my thoughts

My brain refusing to comprehend,

should I run?

should I hide?

should I fight?

Fear, like an improbable

thief in the night

plundering my thoughts

stealing away my abilities

for decisive action

I must think

I must exploit

my remaining choices

Fear seeks to freeze

my understanding

of the real world

Fear builds upon the unknown

the unbidden becomes tangible

feeling powerless.

wait awhile

be positive

Fear may be defeated

(Fear is not all-powerful)

assert the truth

demand the right

Now an explanation of how it came about.

One Idea is sometimes called mechanical poetry. There are a number of on-line poetry generators for what they are worth. I always thought of them as a bit of fun. I have in the past actually written programs in basic to generate poems from a list of lines either in memory or from inputted data. So I have an idea how they work. But in the spirit of a little fun, I was trying one or two of these. I did find one that I thought gave passable results, and one of the offerings actually caught my attention.

I took the half a dozen lines and turned them into three stanzas of similar length. I am not sure how this really works, maybe I should have sat on it for a few weeks but I am so glad to have actually completed something other than my other relief valve, a haiku. I have to admit that I actually used a thesaurus for the first time for this poem, it almost seems like cheating but it did help to provide a couple of words which I preferred to my originals.

I think the ending is OK, but may look at it again and attempt to edit one or two lingering doubts. So here it is for now:-