Tag Archives: poetry

221. The Wall

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This post carries a poem at the bottom. Pardon me while I set the stage for it.

I wrote this poem years ago, when Trump wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar. It isn’t about him, but he eventually came to symbolize what the poem spoke against. When he started talking about a wall, I published the post repeated below, back in September of 2015. AWL was a new blog then, and no one was reading, so once again . . .

Have you ever asked yourself, “How could Germany have been fooled into following Adolph Hitler?” The answer is on your television this morning, and it is Donald Trump.

I’m not saying that Trump is a Nazi. I don’t see him as evil, merely foolish. But the techniques that have brought him to prominence are the same techniques that Hitler used.

First, appeal to a country’s deepest fears.
Second, claim to be the only one to have the answer.
Third, claim that your opponents are all cowardly and incompetent or, to use Trump’s favorite word – stupid.

The tactics are false. But the fears are real, so Trump promises his followers a wall to keep the world out. There is no wall strong enough to do it.

*****

This morning, September 15, 2015, Hungary closed its borders with a wall of razor wire. By the time this post reaches you, it will have been breached. Count on it.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 forms my first political memory. I was eight, and I remember sitting in front of the TV with my parents watching the streams of refugees escaping Soviet reprisals. Eventually 200,000 Hungarians fled. That memory makes it hard for me to watch Hungary put up a wall against Syrian refugees fleeing genocide.

Backed by Russia, East Germany built a wall across Berlin in 1961. It slowed the flow of refugees escaping from tyranny, but it did not stop them. And it didn’t stop the fall of East Germany.

There is a fence across our southern border that holds back no one hungry enough to jump it. Trump wants a wall to hold out “illegals” and a massive sweep through our country to deport the “illegals” who are already here. He wants declare that the 14th amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, in order to authorize the deportation of American citizens, born here just like you and I were.

Hitler would be proud. East Germany would understand. Russia is laughing.

*****

Poetry should stand without explanation, but, like anything else, it can be misused. So, be notified! This is not a right wing call to man the barricades to keep the enemy out, but a cautionary tale about what it will cost us if we don’t find real solutions.

Hungry

We who horde the common wealth
Upon this crowded planet,
Must look to see what lies beyond
Our barricaded borders.

The world stares back,
Unblinking eyes — prepared
To eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

                              It’s happened all before.

Once, seven in a cave drove out the eighth
With stones and fire-sharpened sticks,
Because the antlered carcass on the ground
Was not enough to feed them all.

And then in ancient days when kings and priests
Invented both religion and the law,
To fill their coffers so that they could eat
While those who raised the food went hungry.

Or yet again, when men of white
Despised the black, and black despised the gray.
And those whose colors ran together were disowned.
Color was enough to make them hate
But hunger taught them how and why
A thousand years ago.

Yet still we breed and laugh,
And play at deafness, though an angry sound
Declares the world is poised to seize its bread.

They will march like locusts through the earth,
And eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

This world is troubled. We are surrounded by people hungry for bread and freedom. Pointing a finger at them and saying, “It’s your fault!’ won’t solve our problems.

And a wall won’t do it. Never has; never will.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

203. Leap on the Bandwagon

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This series starts with 178. Leap Boy, back in the news and continues in 192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap and then in 200. The Last Sane Man.

It’s hard to say who made the first mistake. Certainly Leap’s mother should never have named him Leap, even if he was born on Leap Day. Some temptations just have to be resisted. Worse, she should have spoken his name out loud when she named him. Leap Alan Hed, for heaven’s sake. How could she have missed that Alan would become A., and no one could ever meet her son without saying Leap A. Hed.

Leap wasn’t blameless himself. By fighting back to the point of absurdity, he made himself famous enough to come to public attention. Counting his age by leap-day-birthdays and calling himself 16 when he was in his sixties — that’s just asking to be noticed.

Of course Billy Joe Barker was to blame for touting him as a write-in candidate for President. Then when he said that Leap was sane because he really didn’t want to be President, it was the last nail in Leap’s coffin.

People never give you what you want, but they always give you what you don’t want. Didn’t anybody know that?

Shelia Barnstaple of Wilmington, Ohio started a blog called I Want Leap for President. Wilton Damonson of Ash Fork, Arizona started a competing blog called Leap on the Bandwagon, also using the hashtag #LeaponforLeap. You would not believe how many people have 140 characters worth of something to say.

Throughout August, as Donald sank in the polls, people first sighed with relief, then suddenly realized that Hillary would probably win. Someone published a poem anonymously that read:

When Donald came I feared the worst,
If he won it just might kill me.
He surely was the worst of worst,
But second worst was Hillary.

Within days the doggerel was re-posted four million times, and a hundred and ninety-two people were claiming authorship.

Meanwhile, Shelia Barnstaple and Wilton Damonson combined forces and the draft Leap movement really took off. Leap found his house in Dannebrog surrounded by reporters. It looked like Marilyn Lovell’s lawn in Apollo 13. Leap came out with a shotgun to run them off, but they only clicked their cameras faster. He retreated. The shotgun was never loaded, since Leap was basically a peaceful fellow, but the hashtag #Leapforlawandorder raced around the globe at the speed of light.

Leap drew the shades and locked his doors, turned out all the lights but one, and settled in to wait out the silliness with his paperback collection of Nero Wolfe novels. After an hour, the reporters started pounding on his door, then on his windows, and finally on the walls of his house. He couldn’t call for help since he didn’t have a phone, but his neighbors took pity and brought in the county sheriff. He drove the mob back into the street.

That night, Barnstaple and Damonson posted a call to join Leap in his Silent Vigil for America. Three hundred thousand people promised that they would.

Sometime during the night, a darkly clothed figure joined the reporters breifly, then quietly faded away. Once it was light the next morning, Armin Arkin of WFUD noticed that the back door was ajar and announced that he was going in. Within minutes, the street was empty and the house was jammed with anchors and their cameramen elbowing for room to broadcast, but Leap had disappeared.

152. Montrose and Argyil

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Here is a poem based in an era when having the wrong religious belief would get you killed very quickly and very cruelly.

The English Civil War was fought while America was being born, between fierce sects of Protestant Christians, over points of doctrine so small that no one remembers them but historians. It was a time of multiple and conflicting loyalties, when opportunists and men of conscience alike changed sides, then repented and changed back again. Much of the freedom of religion we cherish in America today came as a reaction to the excesses visited on the people when armies decided what God had intended.

It was not unlike Shia and Sunni today. I understand them both, and fear them both when they march, because I remember how recently our Christian ancestors were killing each other for the same kinds of reasons.

To explain the obscure points in this poem, it takes place in Scotland which was under English rule. The tolbooth is Edinburgh city hall and the heads of executed prisoners were hung there. Corbies are crows in the Scots language. Montrose and Argyll were sometime enemies, depending on shifting fortunes. Both fought long and eventually lost – then lost their heads. I have bent history enough to put them on the spikes at the same time, so they could have a final conversation.

Montrose and Argyll

There is a spike by the Tolbooth side
Where famous heads are hung to dry;
There came the Marquise of Argyil,
Bereft of body, to reside.

In sun and rain, by weeks and days,
‘Til bare of flesh, by corbies pared,
Above the commons in the street
Who gibed and jeered, and milled and stared.

Montrose later joined him there,
Come newly from the scaffold head,
With fresh and bloody countenance,
Unwelcome, save that he was dead.

Then Montrose said to Argyil’s skull,
Staring eyeless at his side,
“A martyr’s death ye sought and found;
I see your flesh is mortified.”

The skull spoke back, “My Lord Montrose,
Ascent has brought you to my side;
And yet the rose upon your cheek
Comes newly leaking from your eye.”

They bickered harshly through the day
Of who was right when King Charles fell,
And who the Lord most dearly loved,
And who would spend his days in hell.

Then said the Marquise of Argyil,
“That ye died was no one’s fault but yours.
Ye had the chance to do the right,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

Replied the Marquise of Montrose,
“Full many died, whose deaths are yours.
Ye had the chance to let them live,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

They both paused, their voices spent,
Reflecting on the weary years,
The twists, the turns, the changing sides,
Betrayals, deaths, and bitter tears.

To overthrow an upstart King,
Then, repentant, bring him back again.
For Scotland, God, or Covenant
‘Til Cromwell’s axe cut short his reign.

Now all is done; the King is dead,
The Scottish church no stronger stands;
Both Marquises have lost their heads,
And Cromwell strides upon the land.

  * * *

          Myself, I am a sinful man,
          My kindness an indifferent sort.
          Temptation is my truest friend,
          And prayer remains a last resort.

          Yet when I stood beneath those spikes
          To hear the dead and mighty speak
          With undiminished passion still,
          Though hung in shame before the weak.

          I wondered then, as I ask now,
          What further deeds they might begin,
          In Jesus’ name, on Jesus’ flock,
          If they were not such Christian men.

129. Poetry on Cyan

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What do you do at the end of a long day of exploring a new planet like Cyan? Watch TV? Read a book? Maybe a western shoot-em-up, since science fiction wouldn’t be much of a change of pace.

If Uke Tomiki were one of your colleagues, you might write poetry.

It was late.  Beyond the meadow, the jungle was predominantly blue-green with spots of color where flowers of innumerable variety grew, and where tiny, flower-winged amphibians fluttered.  Globewombs glittered in the tree tops like a scattering of jewels in the dying light.  Procyon was setting as they watched, and night flying amphibians were coming out to catch the chitropods.  A small herd of dropels grazed just beyond the fence.

Tasmeen said:

Sunlight pearls,
Treetop caught.
Wombs of glass wherein
Tomorrow waits.

“Nice,” Keir said.  “Did you just compose it?”

“Oh, no.  I’ve been working on it for days, but it won’t come right.  What do you think?”

“Maybe a bit too clever at the end.”

“Too sweet?”

“Something like that.”

“Any suggestions?”

Keir smiled.  “You’ve heard my poetry.  You know I’m not the one to ask.  What would Uke tell you?”

Tasmeen made a face.  “Less is more.”

“So I humbly submit – bearing in mind the humility that Uke’s poetry has forced upon me . . .”  Tasmeen hit him in the arm, and he grinned, “that you take an axe to it.”

She sighed and said, “I knew you were going to say that.”  She repeated the poem, now abbreviated:

Sunlight pearls,
Treetop caught.
Wombs of glass.

Keir spread his hands.  “That’s it.”

“It will require a more knowledgeable audience than the first version.”

“Hey,” Ramananda demanded, “ain’t we sophisticated enough for you?”

Sometimes Keir thought that Tasmeen and Uke’s poetry caught more of Cyan than their scientific findings.  After sex and discussing their research – probably in the other order – making poetry had become their primary form of recreation.  

Tasmeen recited several of her newer poems, then teased Keir, “Do you have any new bordello rhymes for us?”

Keir knew that Tasmeen would only badger him until he relented, so he recited his latest.

Call me Gomorrah, she said.
Nothing more —
Unless you count her straining
          breasts as speech.
Call me Gomorrah —
          It told me all I had to know.

Ramananda shook his head in mock distaste.  “Always the dirty mind.”

“I like it!”  Tasmeen protested, then took Keir’s hand and said, “You can call me Gomorrah any time you want to.

113. Gray Days

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The internet has its faults; you have to be careful since Albert Einstein and Alfred E. Newman could both be setting up websites.

My favorite use of this technology is refreshing my memory on things I already know from a lifetime of inhabiting libraries. The second best thing is stumbling onto questions I didn’t even think to ask.

Not everyone likes that, as an imaginary street person once told me.

These gray people of the street are with us always. We know that some of them are there from hunger, from drugs, or from mental incapacities of various kinds, but others are there for personal reasons we will never understand. I have no difficulty imagining myself among them, had life treated me differently, or had I made other choices.

Come and meet an imaginary friend who doesn’t want our sympathy and doesn’t want us to understand him. He just wants us to drop a coin as we go by.

Gray Days

I had a wife,
I had a child,
I had a job,
I had a house,
I had my friends
and recreations,
And all those things
that made the noise
that filled my head
until I could not think;
And all those things
that crowded me
until I could not breathe.

No more.

Now I sit, gray days, on concrete steps.
When it rains, I go inside.
Passing among the purposeful,
Who bustle, peer, and mutter their impatience;
Among the masters and the fools,
Encased in pasteboard and in cloth.
Bound up; neatly stacked;
Cataloged and categoried.
With icons blazoned on the spine
So the hurried never find
Anything they didn’t want to know.

Once I wrote;

Once I spoke to the multitude.
My name was here
Between Dickinson and Dickens.
My life between two covers.

No more.

I saw my work for sale,
Twenty-five cents, obsolete.
It stood unbought upon the shelf
With tattered War and Peace and Valley of the Dolls.

No matter.

I like it best on gray days, when I can sit
Silent on the steps.
My can proclaims my purpose –
“Give me coin!”
And who, in this great, striving city,
Could ever question me on this,
My silent industry.
All day long the coins rain down;
Nickels, pennies, dimes –
Hardly enough to keep a mouse alive.

No matter.

I did not come to find my fortune,
Only solitude.
And I have found it.
Every face that passes meets my eye;
Furtive, quick,
And quickly looks away.
It is enough.
It’s all I want, and nearly all that I could stand.
Nearly more than I can stand.

Harried woman, children clinging to your skirt,
I understand.
Hurried man, full of worry, I understand.
You have a million dollars paper,
and not one thing to call you own.

I have enough for supper.

108. Enough

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Do not misunderstand! This is not about suicide. It is about letting go, and knowing that no one lives forever.

It is also the flip side of David Singer’s frenetic pursuit of immortality in To Go Not Gently, in Serial, and in the novel A Fond Farewell to Dying.

Enough

The old man walked the narrow path
That snaked between the boulder falls,
Past the sound of water moving
Deep within the willow thickets,
Upward toward the one lone tree
That marked the juncture of the sky.

There he stopped beneath the tree
Where the cliff fell sheer away.
A thousand feet below him lay
Tall tips of trees, and the sun,
Yellowed by the rising dust
And reddened by the end of day.

The old man eased his bones
Gently into roots’ embrace,
And looking out, he said, “Enough.”

“Ten thousand sunsets I have seen,
“I do not need to see another.”

All his life came to him then;
Marched in review before his eyes,
Comrades, children, and his wives.
Briefly his — now all passed on,
Briefly his — forever gone.

He settled deeper into soil,
And closed his eyes to outward sight.
The birds he heard were decades past;
The smell was lilacs overhead,
When he first lay with his first wife.

His heart, filled up with that which was,
He closed to passage of his blood;
And was complete.

106. Super Tuesday

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Super Tuesday, March first. By the time this hits the ‘net many of you will already have voted, because I am on a west coast schedule.

You surely know more about this day than I do, since I am writing this in late January. Today, Trump is ahead of everybody on one side, and the other side is up for grabs.

I have no intention of suggesting whom you should vote for, but I do have something to say. Politics is about now and tomorrow and the next day. Politics is about making the best of a bad situation, and the situation is always bad. Politicians shouldn’t outright lie, but any politician who answers every question with the full truth, will never be elected.

One standby that never fails to get a vote is:

They are coming to get us, to smother us, to bury us, to kill us, but I can stop them if you will help me build a wall.

American has been building walls since before it was America. They never work.

*****

In September, when this website was only three weeks old and no one was listening yet, I posted a poem. Here it is again, for your consideration.

Poetry should stand without explanation, but, like anything else, it can be misused. So, be notified! This is not a right wing call to man the barricades to keep the enemy out, but a cautionary tale about what it will cost us if we don’t find real solutions.

Hungry

We who horde the common wealth
Upon this crowded planet,
Must look to see what lies beyond
Our barricaded borders.

The world stares back,
Unblinking eyes — prepared
To eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

                              It’s happened all before.

Once, seven in a cave drove out the eighth
With stones and fire-sharpened sticks,
Because the antlered carcass on the ground
Was not enough to feed them all.

And then in ancient days when kings and priests
Invented both religion and the law,
To fill their coffers so that they could eat
While those who raised the food went hungry.

Or yet again, when men of white
Despised the black, and black despised the gray.
And those whose colors ran together were disowned.
Color was enough to make them hate
But hunger taught them how and why
A thousand years ago.

Yet still we breed and laugh,
And play at deafness, though an angry sound
Declares the world is poised to seize its bread.

They will march like locusts through the earth,
And eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

This world is troubled. We are surrounded by people hungry for bread and freedom. Pointing a finger at them and saying, “It’s your fault!’ won’t solve our problems.

And a wall won’t do it. Never has; never will.

86. N——

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Be sure to drop in to Serial where I am presenting a piece about a boy coming to grips with racism on the verge of the Civil War.

There it is, the N—– word. Everybody in America is afraid of it. When Paula Deen admitted using it during her youth (at a time when everybody in the South was using it freely), they almost crucified her. Granted, a lot of people were just waiting for a chance, but that was their excuse.

I could write it out plainly. It’s my blog; nobody is going to censor me. I feel a little foolish writing a letter followed by dashes, as if eveybody didn’t know what it meant. But if I spelled it out, I would feel like a little kid cussing in front of his parents, then pretending he didn’t know they were there.

I grew up whiter than white (see  posts 46. and 81.), in a black-free community. So how do you learn to hate or fear someone you never see?

Easy. You listen to your parents and their friends, and absorb their attitudes. I didn’t come to hate, in part because my parents didn’t hate. But they did fear.

Black folks seeking freedom during the sixties taught my mind and my heart not to fear them. But the gut takes longer. Forty years later I wrote a poem to confront the fear that lingered.

          Mother Tongue

               I saw a calf born.
His mother, in her need to clean him,
Knocked him over on his first rising,
And on his second rising.

In her need to make him safe,
she drove him to his knees.

               Words are like that –
A mother tongue that overwhelms us,
That makes us what we are,
and sometimes, what we should not be.

*****

When I see a black man, I hear “nigger”
Spoken sharply in my father’s voice.
I step back, my eyes grow tight,
Suspicion fires my blood,
And for one moment he is my enemy.

Then reason returns,
And I am shamed.

It is my father’s fear.
I would leave it in my father’s grave,
If I could . . .,  but I cannot!

I can only drive it down;
And bury it deep in shameful, hollow places.

If reading can remake our thoughts, writing can do even more. Making this poem a decade ago and facing my shame largely removed that inherited fear.

from Spoon River

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hiatusSpoon River Anthology: Lucinda Matlock

Edgar Lee Masters is not overlooked, and his Spoon River is well known, but not well enough. It would be hard for it to have its due, since it is, for my taste anyway, one of the crowning achievements of American literature.

Masters lets his 200 plus characters speak their minds without authorial censorship. They are grave, gay, kind, angry, cynical, full of love, full of hatred, spewing venom and offering forgiveness. Masters never tries to arbitrate. He simply lets them tell their stories from the grave, but he does juxtapose. Tom Merritt tells of being killed by his wife’s lover, then his wife tells her story, then the killer tells his. Three stories on three pages, but with viewpoints so different they could be in different universes.

Choosing a poem to illustrate Spoon River could become an exercise in choosing what I believe, thus skewing the picture. Spoon River is huge in variety. Like the Bible, you can find arguments somewhere in it to bolster any position.

Instead, I’ll give you what seems to be Masters’ favorite, the story of his grandmother, given under another name.

Lucinda Matlock
from The Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters – 1915

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed —
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.

Hiatus, sort of ends today. The fantasy short story Prince of Exile will begin here Monday.

71. New Year, New Century

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DSCN4794The end of the year is my favorite season. Whether you are Christian or not, the story of the birth of the Christ child is also the birth of hope, the birth of joy, and the birth of innocence. We need all those things in our world. I have come to love this season more now than I did when I was a child.

Add a sense of the world’s renewal at the turning of the year that comes to us from the pagan roots of our Christmas festivals, and it all becomes pretty magical.

I have already spent time celebrating the year’s end as we Westerners see it. Now, on the last day of the year, I would like to turn toward the East, to a land beyond the land of the Magi.

*****

Rabindranath Tagore is a Bengali writer who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. He is largely unknown in America, and for good reason. His work is hard going – not because of difficuty of language (there are plenty of translations), but because it is the product of a spiritualism that is beyond the American norm. America loves it’s gurus; we all know that. But the ones who make it here tend to have a gift for sound bites, an easy pop-psych message, and a face the camera loves.

Tagore was glitz free.

When I was studying Anthropology, my subject area was South Asia. I ran across Tagore’s poem Sunset of the Century in a textbook, and was so taken by it that I quoted part of it when I wrote A Fond Farewell to Dying, and quoted it again as the sub-title of this website.

At sunset, December 31, 1899, Tagore looked at his land, crushed under a hundred and fifty years of British domination, and looked forward to the new century which he hoped would bring India its freedom.

Here is the excerpt I quoted in Fond Farewell:

Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the proud and the powerful.
With your white robes of simpleness.
Let your crown be of humility, your freedom the freedom of the soul.
Build God’s throne daily on the ample bareness of your poverty.
And know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting.

That last line is probably my favorite quotation of all time. The complete poem is in today’s Serial post.