A Poet, A Bum and Some Philosophers


I am writing about my man, Charles Bukowski, again. The poem I am sharing today is the opening piece of his book named What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire that was published in 1999. I wish I could be reading life in such a simple way which is expressed in the poem below: Reading the meaning in the actions, rather than listening too many stories from too many people...
Enjoy :)

    my father and the bum

    my father believed in work.
    he was proud to have a
    job.
    sometimes he didn't have a
    job and then he was very
    ashamed.
    he'd be so ashamed that he'd
    leave the house in the morning
    and then come back in the evening
    so the neighbors wouldn't
    know.

    me,
    I liked the man next door:
    he just sat in a chair in
    his back yard and threw darts
    at some circles he had painted
    on the side of his garage.
    in Los Angeles in 1930
    he had a wisdom that
    Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
    Nietzsche, Freud,
    Jaspers, Heidegger and
    Toynbee would find hard
    to deny.

2 comments:

Kayhan said...

Never get out of bed before noon.
Charles Bukowski

:)

Sokrates'in Yeğeni said...

Hello! I enjoyed the poem too much and translated it to Turkish. Here it is.

Regards.