In addition to everything else, Saga is a very good poet. No, not poet in a teenage girl sense, but a real poet. Someone who can really see the world in a way that others don’t. And this is not just a proud father saying this — Saga just got news that she was shortlisted for the Foyle’s Young Poets Prize. They have real poets as judges and, get this, more than 7,000 submissions from all over the world. The letter congratulating her called it a “great achievement.” Yes, I’m proud, but I’m also not very surprised. She really is that good. Read this:
Thrones of Mortality
For there comes a time
When one must realize, that the Chinese emperor
Was just a man who sat on a chair.
A chair that – yes,
Could conjure up the vicious howls
Of ancient phantoms,
And exercise incantations from years of yore –
But was, in all simplicity,
Just a chair.
And there comes a time
When one must realize that
Confucius was merely the sweet aftertaste
From a night of
Wine-drinking,
Love-making,
Sticky-rice-mauling.
And that the lump on his bald head
Was nothing but a mother’s swollen womb
Where a baby girl once slept
Before she was swallowed by her quiet mistake.
And there comes a time
When one must venture to the
Realms of death and admit that –
Yes, there is a silence separating us and
Mortality, that spreads across the mind of
man like a black mud –
But we must focus on the important things,
The grass beneath my feet, for example.