I am the bad shepherd
Leading my flocks through pennants flying
To slaughters paid for by pastures green
I reap behind their backs
Yea, though it be the valley of the shadow of death
I am sure of my sinewy cant
My rod and my staff I wave about
Filled with the fire of God
I am sure of the snake oil I sell
And ascribe evil to all who look askance
As I feed the wolves that feed on the flocks
That heed my voice in bliss
For the righteous will have their due
And I'll blush at no expedient lie
The dogs do keep my flocks in line
As we approach the End Times
I am the bad shepherd
Selling my wool before I shear
Finally to shear them to the bone
Far from all still waters
Eric Mader,
September, 2003
Make no mistake. If I write Notes to this poem, it's not because I consider it a major poetic accomplishment. I know it is not. Rather I write these notes simply because the story of the poem's writing is amusing in a confused kind of way. The notes explain something of how the poem came about.
I wrote "The Bad Shepherd" almost in a flash after coming upon the following lines by the Scottish poet Robert Crawford:
I am the bad shepherd, torching my flocks in the
fields,
Feeding them accelerant, hecatombs of wedders
and tups.
In pits or pyres all are sheared and shamed by
the flames.
Every sheep is a black sheep in that fire,
Penned in by heat, conspicuously consumed.
(from Robert
Crawford: The Tip of My Tongue)
I'm not certain if this is the whole of Crawford's poem because I haven't a copy of his book here. Evidently Crawford wrote his shepherd poem as an evocation of the last European outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. I came upon the lines while doing an online search for something else, and after reading them I reached for my notebook, and my own bleak pastoral above was the result.
But I knew it wasn't Crawford's poem alone (that and Psalm 23) that
was in my crop when I wrote of my own bad shepherd. There was a "bad shepherd" poem I'd read last year
in The New York Review of Books,
a poem that, like mine, was written in honor of George W. Bush and his
incendiary administration. I've
just now spent nearly an hour trying to find that poem, to no avail. Was it maybe published somewhere else
and not in The New York Review of Books? It's possible. I can't quite be certain where I read
it.
But also: The morning after I wrote my four stanzas I went back to
read Psalm 23. I wanted to check
the exact wording of the original in the King James Version, and was a little
surprised at what I found:
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me
beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine
enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
I was surprised by this text because I'd distinctly remembered the
line: "Through pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters
by." (In fact in echo of
these words I'd ended the first draft of my own poem with the line "Far
from all silent waters.") As
I could see upon checking the King James, however, the parallel line reads:
"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he
leadeth me beside the still waters."
Still waters, not silent waters. So
from where, I wondered, had the more melodious version come into my head--"Through
pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by"? It must, I supposed, have come from the
Revised Standard Version, the text we read back in Sunday School at Divine
Redeemer Lutheran when I was a kid.
I went to check that text, but found that the RSV was different too.
Where, then, had they come from, these lines rooted in
my memory:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want,
He makes me down to lie;
Through pastures green he leadeth
me the silent waters by.
I finally decided to have recourse to the Internet and
ran a search. I laughed aloud when
I got my answer. In fact the
version of Psalm 23 closest to my heart had apparently come from. . . Pink Floyd's album Animals. I'd listened to the album at least two-hundred times when I
was fifteen or sixteen. The
pastiche of the psalm comes in the song "Sheep," and the whole text
reads:
The
Lord is my shepherd,
I
shall not want;
He
makes me down to lie.
Through
pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by.
With
bright knives he releaseth my soul;
He
maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He
converteth me to lamb cutlets;
For
lo, he hath great power and great hunger.
When
cometh the day we lowly ones,
Through
quiet reflection and great dedication,
Master
the art of karate, lo, we shall rise up,
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.
Did Pink Floyd come up with those first four lines or do they come
from somewhere else? Do they come
from The Book of Common Prayer
maybe? Anyhow it really doesn't
matter in my case. I wasn't raised
Anglican. I have to face the fact
that my dearest version of Psalm 23 came from Pink Floyd.
Certainly Pink Floyd and Robert Crawford and that New York
Review of Books poem account
for something of my rush to write my own indictment of our new American Bad
Shepherd. The notion of a bad
shepherd poem had been gathering in my unconscious. But there was maybe one further element that cinched
it. The pastoralist theme had been
in my crop during the recent few days because I'd just read Bruce Chatwin's
essay on nomadic culture in the collection What am I Doing Here?
The essay, "Nomad Invasions," is a meditation on the culture
of pastoral nomads in both the Bible and history. It probably fixed a wider historical frame in my mind, after
which I came upon the Crawford lines and reached for my notebook to write out
my own.
I sent the poem to friends, one of whom, the poet Ryu Makoto,
responded promptly. He criticized
it for being too direct in its satire, not oblique enough. He also suggested I stick closer to my
model in the 23rd Psalm. These
criticisms are surely good--Ryu is five times the poet I am--but I've left the
poem as is, at least on this page.
Ryu also sent two examples of his own, one he wrote years ago in Japan,
the other written I'm not sure when.
I'll include them here, to round out this little anthology.
The Diet is my cash register.
I shall not want.
It leadeth me beside slow cash flows
Into green bank accounts.
It setteth Daiwa and Nomura
on a table before me
for their names' sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of Total Indebtedness,
Hashimoto's rod and his staff shall lead me
To refinance debt into capital,
And we shall walk on Cloud Nine
With the Imperial Family
Forever.
Amen.
Our oil well,
Which art in Arabia,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy deal be done,
In Riyadh as it is in Houston.
Give us this day
Our daily barrel,
And forgive not the Iraqi debt to Kuwait
As we have forgiven Mexico's.
And lead us not into Armageddon,
But deliver us from Saddam Hussein
As you did from Khomeini, Khadafy and Nasser.
For thine is the stock market,
The internal combustion engine,
And the Pentagon
Forever and ever.
Amen.
(Note: Ryu Makoto is one of the pen names of Drew Stroud. He currently runs Saru Press International .)
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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