Freedom Poem by Peter Elliott

Freedom is

A cheap-wine
Emotional
Wide-eyed
Orator

Directing crowd-puppet minds

To verbal castles
Starry and glittering
With meaningless symbols
Instead of bricks.

We can see it, breathing shallow,

In grotesque
Mile-high mounds
Of gleaming
Crumbling
Rotting
Bones

Of its devotees, down the Ages.

We all gaze longingly,
Moon-eyed and breathless,
At the dizzy traces
Of the fleeting gull

And murmur: such grace so free

Knowing deep within
The bird is
Hunting
Eating
Commuting sleeping
Living just like you and me.

Knowing too
That were we
To transport ourselves
To dreamy South Pacific Isles

Survive

The icy rigour
Of hermit's cave
Where winds shriek bleak
Over cliff face bare

We should never be free

Consciously free, that is.

I wander
In wonder
Through gardens
Of unremembered time travel
Seven hours a night
On gentle currents
Of unknown harmony

Perhaps this is freedom?

If so, it's stacked away
On a high shelf
Out of reach
In a cupboard called Death
And I've lost the key.

And still, stubbornly,

Knowing freedom
Is as unobtainable
As a nuclear-powered Dodo

I want to be free.

(May 1970, Cape Town, South Africa)