Any idea - choose one!

The 20th century abstract painter, Willem de Kooning, is quoted in reflecting on his art that "any idea is as good as another". Though I certainly have no credentials in art history or esthetics, my guess is that he meant that any concept, idea or mental picture is as likely to generate works of artistic merit, beauty, truth, self-awareness, social criticism, etc as any other. In any case, a similar assumption underlies my approach to blogging, at least in my early fumbling attempts. Rather than invest much energy in finding the right topic (and hitting the correct note), I have let the blog take the lead pursuing its own logic while I run to keep up several steps behind. If this sounds a bit whacko, this likely applies to many of us who decide to communicate primarily through the soundless bit-stream and/or who remove themselves to places where "black and gold" are just colors, not the banner leading into battle and on which we center our lives...

This leads me to cabbages (obviously)... I have attached a bit of poetic reflection ("a poem" suggests a polished and completed work, that doesn't apply here) that reflects my approach to poetry and the idea of one image being :just as good as"... To my wife's regret and my shame, I have yet to fulfill my promise to her to publish (before I perish, presumably) some of my pieces and this one of the few I've ever shared publicly, the first of my Saudi opus. So I consider this a pre-pub pilot, a "toe in the water" for future efforts.

Please accept the following for whatever it's worth as my holiday season gift to you, my dear friends.

Cabbages and kingdoms

Row of cabbages or second cousins

serving as shoe-top hedge rows

sidewalk trim modestly foreign to

color display drawing attention

as unseemly and unArabic

rather as sentinel guard of stability…

Certainly not pinkish impatience

seeking out the Saudi sun but

patiently enduring it like

parched palms bordering & scanning

murderous highways:

Unexpected flora

reminders unsolicited of

gap and chasm unbridged between

being now Riyadh-embedded

as a not-young man with

familiar but receding past

demarcating

the kingdom of discontinuity,

of dampened not extinguished fires,

hope remnant in the backdrop

of disquieting dreams

Cabbage rows pointing toward an

eternal mystery, the query:

Why this world? Why any world at all?

The cabbages are silent and unmoved…

Wes Rohrer

December 1, 2011

Riyadh