What’s in a name?
In your case a great deal.
Of course,
There are many names
Pregnant
With meaning,
Such as Yeshua
And Amadeus.
The name Shake-speare
Alludes to Athena
The goddess of wisdom
And defender
Of civilization.
These men fulfilled
Their name’s potential.
Although not Midas
Or Goldfinger –
Archetypal
Pecuniary alchemists –
Your name,
Nay, triad or trinity of names,
Couldn’t be more apt.
And you are a real person!
Along with George Orwell
And Aldous Huxley’s,
Has his “kingdom” come?
Not long ago I dreamt
I was watching a film
In which Russia’s president –
Rasputin revived –
Played with love
James Bond.
In my next nightmare,
With the aid
Of one called Conway
Will you be in fact
Goldfinger
Or, let’s say, director
Of the latest blockbuster
Live and Let Lie –
Or How the West was Lost?
Trumpery
Was the word
That sprang to mind:
“Something showy, shallow
And base;
Nonsensical and delusive”,
Which can fool
Some of the people
Some of the time.
Then came the debates,
And the name Trump
Began
In the collective conscious
To be real
Rather than merely virtual.
One could call it
A quantum leap:
Indeed, to quote the author
Of John,
“The word was made flesh
And dwelt among us”.
Now that you are
The President-Elect,
To some supporters
And ex-opponents
You’re the consummate gambler –
A Winston Churchill
Or William the Conqueror,
With a helmet of gilded hair,
Always conjuring up
A trump-card;
To others you are in fact
A”good fellow”,
An angel in disguise –
If not messiah;
To others still,
Who no less welcome
Your triumph,
You’re an evil “deceiver”,
The Devil incarnate,
Gog,
Nero resurrected,
Antichrist, or Beast,
Who on Doomsday
Will blow the Last Trump,
To usher in Apocalypse
And, despite yourself,
The Second Coming
Of Christ.
Needless to say,
The author of Revelation
Was named John.
As to Donald –
I’m sure you needn’t ask,
It means
“Ruler of the world”.
I will, however,
Reveal
That once this name’s potential
Was potentially fulfilled,
I prayed you’d be
A Donalbain
(As opposed to “Donwald the bane”
Or, worse still,
Macbeth,
Who built on Earth a hell),
If not a Henry the Fifth
Who had played
“Prince Hal”
In a John Falstaff mask.
But Trumpland
Is neither a theatre
Nor Disneyland.
Here
Not only does fiction
Become fact,
And vice versa,
But fact is stranger
Than fiction:
Lewis Carroll by Einstein
Is out-trumped,
Or by the prophet
Mary Shelley.
In short,
It’s as if the body politic
Has been sucked
Into a particle accelerator
And collider
Or a lab in a UFO.
At the very least,
From the top
Of tumid Trump Tower
You seem to be lord
Of the apocalyptic
Post-truth babel
In cyberspace
That’s confounding
So-called social media
And spawning
A generation
Of Pontius Pilates.
This said,
I must try my best
To be positive –
Not lie in bed
At dead of night
And dread
The Last Tweet.
I’m writing this epistle
And why today,
Presuming you’re not
Schizophrenic
I decided to defer
My final judgment
As to whether you’re a Lincoln
Or a Booth
Or both;
Or simply Donald Trump,
The ultimate pragmatic
And opportunist
So-and-so,
Who, if it ensures success,
Is sanguine
Or choleric
Or phlegmatic
Or melancholic –
In a word,
A man with a sense
For “humour”:
For you’ve just said something
You might in fact mean,
Because, as you yourself implied,
It would surely be
The greatest trump of all.
Believe me,
If you do indeed resolve
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
You will have averted
“Armageddon”
And enabled us to fulfill
Our own vocation –
That is, to become
A dual state or confederation
Of wounded healers
In the Promised Land
And hence a light
To other wounded nations.
And those of your future colleagues
Or stooges,
I now feel obliged
To share with you
Some psychological and spiritual
Truths,
In the belief
That the deepest and greatest
Part of you –
The Soul,
Which cannot be sold
For profit –
Can relate to them :
The wise man knows
Heads and tails,
Ego and shadow,
Good and evil,
Right and wrong
Are present in every psyche
And therefore in each situation
And decision:
Not either-or but both
Reflects the whole.
The art of choice
And creativity
Is to choose the positive
While acknowledging
The negative.
The great leader
Is in tune with
But not possessed by
Or the possessor of
The collective unconscious.
A true “people’s prophet”,
Therefore,
Is no demagogue,
Führer or Pied Piper,
Brewing and inebriated by
The spirit of the age,
But a man of integrity,
Who can touch the mind,
Heart and Soul
Of the dispossessed;
Thus help to integrate
Their natural shadow
And free the love
That longs to be released
And realised.
And by the way.
If he was indeed
The man from Stratford,
The truest artist
And greatest people’s prophet
England has produced –
William (Gilded helmet) Shakespeare –
Was in his supreme wholeness
Also a sharp businessman.
So, having trumped
The establishment,
May you –
The man from Queens, New York –
Choose to bring hope
And peace
To betrayed people
Throughout the world,
Including those who know
That irrefutable –
Namely,
Not trumped up –
Man-made
Climate change
Is the other main harbinger
Of impending hell.
In short, please see
That, though the turn
Of neglected, subjective
“Feelers”
May well have come round
(“To every thing
There is a season”),
If you exclude objective
“Thinkers”,
Democracy and Earth itself
Will be doomed
And I again compelled
To echo
Jeremiah.
On the other hand,
Should you act
Wisely,
Your words by your deeds
Would be healed;
Nine-Eleven by Eleven-Nine
Redeemed;
Trumpsday remembered
Each year;
And your name for ever
Esteemed.
13 November 2016