RHYME Poem: Anti-Depressants, by Donald Watson

Always look on the bright side of life
— Monte Python

Some philosopher-poets labor to create
the sacred from the secular, hallow the physical,
reinvent the sublime, pursue the spiritual.
The interim report is not especially optimistic,
as the theorists disagree about the statistics.

Theologians and scholars can debate how cultures
shape their myths and gods, and why cause
and effect underlie all the laws
of biology and physics, but human discoveries
and social protocols are merely dreamers’ reveries.

Perhaps instead we need humor and farce to look
“on the bright side of things,” comedy
and laughter as the cure for all malady;
Charlie Chaplin to comfort the economically oppressed,
cheer up the homeless masses of the Greatly Depressed.

Or maybe it’s music we need to reach across divisions,
accompany dinner by candlelight, calm the savage
beast, dance away sadness, an old language
understood by every culture, creating new friends
and old lovers; music that all hostility transcends.