The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Ray Greenblatt serve as the inaugural Mad Poet of the Year for 2021.
ROBINSON CRUSOE LIVED THERE
by Ray Greenblatt
At first he was stimulated by his nakedness. He ached for mirrors. After some time he wore his skin as a suit to filter the sun . . .
Sometimes he would sing and dance. Observers might think him crazy. They never did . . .
Wind was his friend cooling him, making shadows slide and shimmy. He would translate what the wind said . . .
He studied the minutest things. On the beach a tiny sand crab appeared out of a hole. Then he reentered his tunnel pulling it after him and disappeared. Ants in a spaced row carrying leaves like coolies to build a thatched hut. Birds with brilliant plumage forever flitting. They all held magic . . .
Every day he exercised his memory. Scraped up every speck and smudge of the past. For the future each word, letter, diary, tome would have to be stored on a specific shelf in his brain . . .
We all need gods. He shaped his god in the form of a ship. What if his savior arrived. Grew larger and larger on the horizon. Would he be awed or terrified . . .
At night he would float on his isle in the sea, on his own planet among the stars.
The fictional Robinson Crusoe lived on a desert island for 28 years. The real castaway—Alexander Selkirk—upon whom Daniel Defoe’s novel (considered by some critics to be the first English novel, 1719) is based lived there for 4 years—long enough! However the length of time, what would you do? I wanted to get inside a stranded person’s head and imagine. This piece turned out to be a prose-poem, because there is such a strong narrative line running through it.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.