poems

Tick

I slipped a tick
into a plastic bag
and watched it
seek escape
swaying to the top 
of the zip slide track
persistent a I
who with mighty thumb
and intelligence
tried to kill it

I failed  
It was
in the corner
of its transparent world
ALIVE
trapped by mighty me
queen for a day

By |2013-04-23T12:42:30+00:00April 23rd, 2013|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Tick

July 30, 2012

 

I used to get up at the crack of dawn
and do a tap dance
On the street the men were loading crates
or emptying garbage barrels
and I’d saunter along
with a song in my heart
voicing to the pavement
when no one could hear
I was shy

Sleep is interrupted these days
a cat jumps to my back
eager for attention
The radio never is on
to keep hell out
which it filters in when I drive
expecting music
or renouncing it

I’m not a slave
Though it’s noon and I slough along
as if time were infinite
That’s my gift to the god of waste
It’s my freedom
I even complain

Meanwhile, over there, I know
starvation proceeds
that Killer is King
that Nightmare is no longer a word
in the language..that it’s only background
the wall paper of existence
where some of us eat

By |2012-08-26T13:34:47+00:00August 26th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on July 30, 2012

Mothers Day, 2012

May 13, 2012

Mother marveled
as she listened to Dad read the want ads
in the New York Review of Books,
someone in braces seeking
a mid-day rendez-vous on Wall Street,
another into good looks, money ,
with a knowledge of Turkish and
Buxtehuede’s Magnificat

…God!
What they want! mother exclaimed
raising her shoulders
with a gasp of amzement,
knowing compromise well
not married to a Hollywood star
or a saint

I’d picked up the publication on the subway
not knowing romance was advertised
on the back pages,
pondering with some measure of success
the meaning of its brilliant theories
and disquisitions
which followed the cover’s bright headlines

My friend Judy subscribed to it
but I was not focused as she
a bit nervous like my father
I gave it a try anyhow
Fnding it was a sign
I brought it home
not thinking Dad would read it,
he with just a grade school education
though fast with numbers like the Chinese with abacus

I’ll say no more about my parents
how their marriage was not made in heaven
with nothing exotic, forbidden , no pre-barroque music,
but how it got me here, I who am not an angel,
I who  brought laughter’s revelation into their home

By |2012-05-14T02:08:06+00:00May 14th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Mothers Day, 2012

I Saw Them

I Saw Them
(L’Uomo che Verra… Director: Giorgio Diritti )

It was another massacre of the innocent
minding their business living,
they with peasant clothes
not neatly pressed like the Nazis’

who gunned them down near an empty building
and the church. all 700 of them.
I knew what they‘d do didn’t need another enactment
how the crime would enfold in the filmic telling

It wasn’t artistic curiosity that  held me
or the wonders of a new language
Bolognese which I barely understood
but the desire not to abandon them

to know and retell it  though they were only  actors
not the ones who were really murdered
the tots and the infants, the five year olds who were crying
the mothers holding them,  the panic and screaming

__________________________________________

The MARZABOTTO massacre was a World War II mass murder of at least 770 civilians by Germans, which took place in the territory around the small village of Marzabotto, in the mountainous area south of Bologna. It was the worst massacre of civilians committed by the Waffen SS in Italy during the war.

By |2012-04-21T16:06:10+00:00April 21st, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on I Saw Them

First Maple Leaves

First Maple Leaves

Clustered like a cupped hand’s fingers
they hang from
twig shoots
Sudden as a nest of bird mouths
they begin the month tiny and definite

Like litters of limp kittens
wherever the gaze lights
they seem ready to wander
though they are going nowhere

Each, with three others inverted,
forms a half open umbrella
dangles delicate there
before grown separate and stiff

they spread themselves flat
on invisible perches
receive all the sun they can get
and shelter us

By |2012-04-16T14:50:45+00:00April 16th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on First Maple Leaves

Sue’s Painting

Sue’s Painting

The blue arch over fire’s horizon
blood and ocean
as complete as clouds allow
reaches Sue
and is affixed to the canvass

Is that smoke ascending
to the south, billowing purple?
And the parrots watching 
are they yellow bibbed warriors 
or simply her imagination, yours
and mine?

By |2012-02-15T12:34:03+00:00February 15th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Sue’s Painting

Wislawa Symborska

We lost a treasure of a poet on Wednesday.  The depth and simplicity of  Wislawa Symborska’s work reflect a great soul who has left us and who will be missed.

TRUE LOVE

True love. Is it normal,
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions, but convinced
it had to happen this way–in reward for what? For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not others?
Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends’ sake!
Listen to them laughing–it’s an insult.
The language they use–deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines–
it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!

It’s hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? what renounced?
Who’d want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.


By |2012-02-04T02:47:00+00:00February 4th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Wislawa Symborska

Next to Nothing

No greater than the sum

of cancer’s brigade

advanced over the border

at 57th Street 

to your skin

Smaller than the gem 

on you thumb

pointing strontium

to flee from

(half-a-life)

Oh tiny

as the pretext for war

all gadgetry’s required

to inflate

A few piranha at your feet

One fine anopheles

The little tse tse 

Pretty grains of wheat missing

Seeds

minute still

ripped from terraced hill

in deluge down to wayside ditch

and swelling up and splitting

 

 

    

    Published Synaesthesia

 

 

 

By |2012-02-04T02:07:08+00:00February 4th, 2012|New Poems, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Next to Nothing
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