BBC World News

The immediacy of living on a small, desert island, with simple needs well met, diminishes the mechanical hunger for world news; and the feelings of anger, remorse, apathy and often, utter uselessness against massive political forces get far removed.

BBC: World News

How utterly irrelevant,
The news of the world
Wafting on in dulcet
Voices of the BBC;
Here, life sparkles like
The fish on the next line,
Or the catch in the
Next cast of net, unfailingly,
In simple, languorous,
Natural immediacy.

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author) now out of print.

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All the Heroes and Sages

A philosphical comment of a man with his muse, who takes him to all the heroes and sages in a reflection of reincarnation that pronounces immortality.

All the Heroes and Sages

I link myself with all the heroes and sages
And gently traverse the road of the ages,
With all the poets and thinkers,
All the martyrs and builders
Of civilisations and cultures everywhere;
I leap over space and ignore time,
Join the hordes of every race and clime,
And like the dust on the pages
Of recorded ages
I blow all empires away;
I know that this wandering me,
May he a king or a peasant be,
Is a mere link on his sole
In the chain as a whole
Of man’s wonderful immortality.

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author)

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God's Man

The following poem provokes Man to thinking about his comical insignificance in the universe:

God's Man
God made man and woman,
Man made husband and wife;
God gave absolute freedom,
Man confined it with religion,
Clothes and domesticity;
God gave the law of nature,
Man reduced it to legalities;
God made forests, mountains
And rivers, man made little
Houses and landscape paintings –
All this, by the little man who claims
He is made in the image of God!

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author)

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Match Me A Woman

Match me a woman
Whose soul is cast
And burnished
Like the bronze,
To weather well
The passage of time
And the inscriptions
Of circumstance;
Whose majesty would
Never fail or diminish
On either
A pedestal thrust,
Or fallen low,
Covered in dust;
Whose passions
Would soar up
To the heavens from
The callow mould of lust,
And but for
The coat of patina green
Would show no signs
On lesser moulds seen,
Of the hideous, corrupting
Encrustations of rust.

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author)

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A Rare Breed

A man who has
The heavens reached
And yet not grubbed
In the dust,
A man who has
Done his passions’ bid
And yet not
Revelled in lust,
Is of a breed as rare
As the winged steed,
Fleet of foot and
Free as the wind,
Rare as the bird
Who never flies,
Or the saint who
Has never sinned;
Yet, I am he,
Once fed with illusions,
Now free
Of heavens, of dust,
Of passions, of lust,
Of breed, of speed
Of the winged steed,
Of the freedom
Of the wind,
Of all the saints
And all the sin –
I am he,
A simple man, free!

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author)

Lessons on a Blackboard

My mind is like a blackboard
In the school of life, on which the chalk
Of circumstance daily inscribes lessons
In lingering veins and of vainest thought,
Till the will, my will, that of the teacher
And the taught, the darling duster, indeed,
Rubs off each line each way and leaves
My mind free, virgin free, for the lesson
Of another day;
Thus I learn what no teacher in his
Teaching taught, work at what
No worker in his working wrought,
Find what no seeker in his seeking sought:
The freedom absolute, the ultimate
Of all pursuit, the gain of every loss,
The nothingness of everything;
And so one day, when my time to go
Will come, and I pass away happily,
Though not in the eyes of some,
For in their limited vision and
Formulated norms,
I will have gone unworking, unteaching,
Untaught, unthinking, unseeking, unsought,
And perhaps, even unborn?

From Island Poems by Ronnie Patel (Lotus Print ISBN 81-88451-02-09 C.Right Author