Open Link Monday, 15th of my poems-a-day

Monday is a sort of day off at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. We have no prompt to write to, no photos to inspire us, although Kerry did include some pretty flowers to make northern-dwellers think of Spring, which is an illusion here, so far, at best. Now we are submitting to Day 15 of our poem-a-day challenge, and I'm still here to annoy you.

I may have recently mentioned Rudyard Kipling. I am of an age when I can get away with mentioning him from time to time, and I also live in an area where many people, who have never memorized any of his poems, still remember that he came through here by train in 1907 and called Medicine Hat, Alberta, "the city with all hell for a basement."

Of course, the world now sees Alberta as the Canadian province with oil for a basement, with senior levels of government hell-bent on sending that oil by pipeline, ship, tanker truck, train, milk cart, or mule team around the world at a serious risk to the Canadian environment. The Canadian federal government has no interest in such things as global warming, sick kids, the environment, endangered species, or the melting of the polar ice cap, but has an abiding interest in oil extracted from the earth by whatever means possible and legislated into transportation by any other means possible, and has therefore met a friend in need, a friend indeed, in the Alberta government.

This made me, for the second time this year, think of Rudyard Kipling, and how he would feel about throwing out the baby (the population) with the bathwater (the oil from the Alberta tar sands).

Unfortunately, I couldn't channel him in order to get his opinion, but I did get unspoken permission to mess with one of his poems, which is almost as good. You'll see I haven't written anything serious at all, because I almost never do.

"Iffen"

(I have to call it Iffen because Kipling himself already wrote "If", you see.)

Iffen

If you can keep your hat when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on God

Who made the wind, but didn’t drag them out there.

If you can trust your wife when all men doubt her

But make allowance for her doubting them.

If you can waltz and not be tired of waltzing,

Or being tied about with chains and lies,

Nor yet not look too good, nor talk too wise...

If you can walk with dogs and keep your kibble,

Or cat with queens, nor lose the softer touch,

And win, then hide up all your winnings,

To twist the knives and make a trap for fools,

If you can fill an unamusing minute

With a minute’s worth of international news,

If you can force your stomach, heart, and sinews

To serve your turn, long after you are gone,

And so hold on when nothing else is in you...

If you can keep your hat when all about you

Have lost theirs in the wind and then blamed you...

You’ll be a woman with bonnet tied, my son!

                                          Kay L. Davies, April, 2013