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HOLIDAY POEM
for David and Phillis Gershator
Make your own holiday, I want to say forget the scolding billboards the feverish malls the glittery tinsel the hard and soft machines the guilt. Forget Santa Claus in his red suit (it was blue in Yugoslavia, a country that has fallen off the map). Forget the gross national product forget Wall Street the rising market. Make your own bread rise in your oven. Make up new recipes. Make your own candles, I want to exhort Make those bees work overtime! The past glimmers seductively that happy safe radiant place where snow wrapped the village in angelhair and Grandma's cranberries winked like rubies. They own it now the conglomerates the CEO's the dream dealers. They sell it back to us in bits and pieces. They've downsized our fantasies. They want us all wrapped snugly in electric blankets dreaming the same-colored dream while the locked-out people, who can't afford dreams, play with matches down the street. Perhaps I shouldn't say a word. I'm a stranger in this culture. In the milltown, the stores dazzled us each December. Red electric bells sang on every corner. Mothers and neighbors swung through the streets gathering, gathering Lionel trains toasters perfume doll furniture bedroom suites. (My tether the radical worked overtime offering, offering smiling, accepting greetings for a day he had no part in, coming home exhausted after all the bells winked out We lit small candles made pancakes hung stockings Santa Claus, my mother allowed but no Christ child no pagan tree. We weren't extremists.) My mother the 30's radical trapped in the 50's in a house too small for alt her talents-even her talent for sorrow- to/d me, "Don't buy me a holiday card. Why make tiye card company richer?" I thought of making my own pulled out paints too messy too lazy too undextrous I grew discouraged. Hallmark could do it better! I gave nothing at ail those years. But this year, in the diminishing 90's when all the old hopeful flames have guttered out, as the century melts down like a candle to a small hard nub, when too many of us are locked out of our stories in this dark cold overworked tunnel of time, I want to give something back to the universe: I want to be politically correct (or incorrect, depending on your viewpoint). I want to say, Let's make a feast, a feast of candles a feast of languages Let's celebrate each other's Gods (and dreams and histories). Lef s sit down and listen. Let's do Christmas Hanukah Kwanzaa solstice Let's invite Buddhists Muslims Hindus secular humanists anarchists Gnostics. Late December is a needy time. But we don't need the solace of bought objects. We need each other's light. Enid Dame 12/96 _____________________________ |
ROBERTOH FABER'S FUNERAL (10/7/05) "RobertOh Faber... is a Pythoness of deepest insight/awareness. If you think that's some kind of snake, use your dictionary" * Will Inman The pythoness was placed in a box and lowered into the earth. Apollo came by, stared a moment into the hole and went his way. After speaking a few words that were God's and a few that were the pythoness's we returned to our ships and sailed away under grimly uncertain skies. Donald Lev *Pythoness: Awoman who practicies divination. A priestess of Apollo ___________________________________ TONY'S SILENCE When Verdi was at work composing, living up the street from La Scala, the road was strewn with hay so he wouldn't be disturbed by the horses' hoofs beating a counter-tempo against his heart. When Tony moved into the new neighborhood he found little trust on the home made streets. They put down glass so the street lights, after a hard freezing rain, would shine up rainbows at all the windows, including Tony's, and cars would drive by. . Barry Wallenstein _____________________ AFTER READING OLD LETTERS FROM THE DEAD Sometimes, there's so little nourishing understanding in all the pantries of the night, when you wake from a bad dream with horror movies in your head and all the stupid, superstitious talk of ghosts as if they were real there in your bed, when they are only in your head stuffed with guilt beneath the quaking quilt. Danela Gioseffi ____________________________________ |
SETTLEMENT OF THEIR PRAYERS Young Wolof speaking men display bright orange, brown and green gowns for Brooklyn prayer~the mosque Albanian. Their men preserve gray, peasant wool. Shoes are placed on shelves and anger dies. Television dies. City walks let men quick and clever hawk slit skirts or leather amid stealth and chaos, sigh sigh sigh. Cicadas bigger than spoonfuls sing hymns from maples. Sleek cicada killers fly and cicadas die. Blame none. Leave the dead behind. Sky could freeze, soon, Albanian and Gambian breaths together. Roses die, tones of voices offered above beads held by a human order. Nathan Whiting _____________________ MY DARLING MAGNOLIA TREE It left me with trembling legs and a mind like a pile of house timbers stacked in the wrong lot. My magnolia tree! my best friend right out back by the raked white sand of my garden My tree was dead! My darling pearl of life! The secret mind no longer whispered through the axions of wonder. Was I Gone? There are at least two types of Gone Beat Gone & Grim Gone and now I'm like a warped plank in that sinister erasure I read about once in a Victor Hugo story a man betrapped in a sink-mire on a long wide beach I am the guy whose legs tremble on the edge of the ward I'm Gone. Gone to the place where the Lake can't be crossed I need help. But this is not a cartoon. And there is no cartouche containing any of the necessary words Well, maybe "Argh!" and the words of Sartre "We are alone, with no excuses." Dope won't help. Tight shoes won't help. The poems of Rilke won't help. Help! won't help There is no secret mind revealing aught about aught or thought about thought in the sprayed X zone of Total Gone from which I can never recover. Therefore I am. Ed Sanders _________________________________________ |
Created on ... September 27, 2007