Good is a spiritual being. May 2013

 

 

Some of her poems are easy to interpret, or at least, can elicit an educated guess as to what they mean and to whom the poem is directed.

This poem about the good fight is not one of those, loaded with ambiguous references that might easily lead to false assumptions, and I believe to some degree this is intentional, as she takes a step back from poems too easily interpreted which left her inner self too exposed.

This poem also takes a giant step back from the intense emotional swings of some of her previous poems. It attempts to be more objective and rational like a mathematician trying to work out a calculation. There is no emotion in math or in logic, and this might be labeled a logical poem in that regard.

In some ways, this poem reflects the theme she posed in her earlier poem on fair and unfair in that what we say are just words. In this case, the word is “defeated”, suggesting a negative outcome to a conflict she has been having with someone she seems to have considered as close because there should not have been a fight at all, and the conflict about who was “right” a waste of time.

“It simply is. Right?”

She implies that there is no absolute right, calling it a sliding scale (once more echoing her redemption poem when she claims right and wrong are just words, and here defeated is just a word, too—and words seem to separate people.

The speaker in this poem seems to want to mend fences, and yet at the same time, not want to admit defeat,

Again, she seems to be desperate to sound logical, reasonable, and yet not accept the other person as being right, and again presses the argument that “truer words” tear them apart.

And so, they fight for the right to be good, where right is something artificial, created, when goodness is not spoken.

This idea that good or right or even happiness gets pissed away by arguing about who is right is the central theme, a wasting away of a life that could be better spent doing better things.

Right, wrong, good and such self-defeating in that they will never be resolved, or fully understood, because they are all aspects of opinion, with both sides of the argument truly believing they are in the right and represent good.

And that whatever good feeling that exists between these two people is lost in the heat of dispute.

The poem is built on seven uneven stanzas. The first of these uses clever word play and irony when the good fight is never good in the midst of the fight because there should not have been a fight in the first place.

The second stanza said it is a waste of life to be spent on things that should simply exist, and the concept of right drags people into dispute when both sides seek to be in the right.

Right simply is, she says, “right?”

The fourth stanza questions the grounds of argument, saying there is a sliding scale or in other words, everybody has their own opinion of what right is, and suggests she might have lost the argument – “defeated” only to argue that defeated is an opinion as well, and that these words tend to separate them.

She gets even more abstract in the fifth stanza when she says, “truer words have never been soke as true,” because true words won’t be spoken as they tear them apart – this suggesting that in the heat of argument, things get distorted, truth gets lost.

And so, in the sixth stanza, this continues the fight “for the right to be good,” where right is created while good is but not spoken, existing of its own accord, but sadly, as the last stanza claims, everybody argues it away.

The poem deals with concepts of truth, goodness, and right as concepts – being right isn’t always true or good, but an opinion, yet good and right are often lost in arguing over them. Good is something that exists, but can’t be defined by words, while good and right are concepts that are created out of speech, and something amounts to little more than hot air.

 

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