Stanley Moss

MURDER

The great poet murderer Chairman Mao
wrote nothing like a revolutionary sonnet
in calligraphy. Forever, then, and now
even if you can’t read it, his poetry is beautiful.
After the Long March the great famine came,
people ate less than rats, blood was champagne.
Mao Zedong was milk, the one tit
that allowed the infant China to exist.
Mao’s first wife was mentally ill, he said,
“I’ll make her a sane, happy communist.”
He sent her to Moscow for ten red,
red years, Mao’s favorite color, not the green
green that Lorca loved. Mao let temples
stand, but he cut off the heads of Buddhas.
He could write a poem beautifully simple,
a gift with a Little Red Book to the people
the same day murder a village of do-gooders.
I paint good news on a krater, neither fake;
the word poetry comes from the Greek to make,
the Chinese character is to keep.
A rattlesnake, I want to make and keep.

* * *
I thought of murdering a lady
who was destroying my son, the reason
I sent her roses wrapped in poison ivy.
April. T.S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land
to il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound.
With breeding lilacs in hand
Pound cheered, raved for Mussolini.
He wished all the Jews were gassed
in death camps. In the end he repented,
he pitied himself, he said his life was a mistake.
There were great poet meanies,
Neruda was a kind Stalinist, alas.
There was one Jorge Luis Borges,
one Paul Celan, one Seamus Heaney.
The ship of life is sinking, poetry is a lifeboat,
wintery death murders, poets give us an overcoat.
Roethke was a racist. I don’t see Theodore
waltzing at lynchings. (I see anti-Semites galore,
from the empire state’s cellar to the top floor.)
Will Burroughs, writer, “gunshot painter,” shot
his wife dead, both of them on H and pot.
I believe in the very right and very wrong,
not sin. Nothing is worse than murdering,
I’ve heard someone murdering a song.
There’s still an electric chair at Sing Sing,
I had a distant cousin who sat in it,
a poet did not throw the switch.
Anyway, the Lord was mistaken to think
“I’ll murder” is the same as doing it.
I’m going uphill, I’ll never reach the summit.
I sew a poem together stitch by stitch.
Camels pass through the eye of a needle,
the devil plays hymns on a fiddle.
The days of our years are threescore and ten,
rich men get more years than poor men.

* * *
I cannot forget great poet and murderer Mao
not soon or after, now,
disguised, I will sip his cup of tea.
I will stir every line with the spoon, “kill.”
Kill. I is a dangerous word. Never forget
Kill. the pronoun we confiscates private property.
Kill. Alone, Mao’s ideas are not private property.
Kill. Dine with two people, three can’t keep a secret.
Kill. One child take care. If you beget
Kill. a girl, should you want to keep her, you have a debt,
Kill. you owe a son to the people’s army.
Kill. A puppy sandwich tastes better than salami.
Kill. Peasants and factory workers know by heart
Kill. the poetry of Tu Fu.
Kill. Buddhist death is a work of art.
Kill. I still want poetry that “makes it new.”
Kill. Suffering and grief are teachers.
Kill. if life were cinema, life’s one reel
Kill. life is not a double feature.
Kill. Be civil, run away from evil,
Kill. beware of the white peril.

New York








John Digby


VOCES FROM THE CATHEDRAL OF MEMORY

I answer from the womb in a rage
where the black filigree of a burnt sun
shifts and moves like a passing glance
across the hazy landscape of a mirror
in memory I name my friends one by one
and hear their voice fall like footsteps
retreating as if they were dropping into
the past where we become children again
but bearded and childish playing games
in some dark dusty corner of a school-room
I return to sleep hearing their voices
calling me calling me back to linger to stay
to watch the sun dance on a pin-head in rage


BEFORE DAY APPEARS

Time  your heart-beat
Palpitates in my hand
It’s as black as a bat’s dream
Of a cave deep inside the moon

You whisper to me
That all roads lead to a solitary star
So distant that I could reach out
And touch it

I hear you chanting
The names of all stars
And one by one
They disappear into the darkness
Leaving swirling holes
Where the peppery hair of the wind fans
Its flames down corridors of memory
Distant grating in the opening fist of space

Time  I hear you singing
And your song becomes a river
In which the darkness sparkles
Like the glittering fingers of fear
Before the day appears
With its terrible fins of red



John Digby, To Amuse a Shrinking Sun,  Anvil Press Poetry, 1985


John  Digby, Sailing Away from Night, Anvil Press Poetry and Kayak Books, 1978

New York




Stanley H. Barkan


A SINGER CHARACTER


Covered with the contempt
of waitresses, doormen, and bus drivers,
Herman slowly walked along Second Avenue
wondering what he should do next.
The few coins in his pocket 
wouldn’t even buy another cup of coffee,
and he hardly had the strength to continue
on to the Second Avenue Restaurant 
on the corner of East Tenth Street
where all his old friends used to gather
talking of poetry and stories and Socialism
and the failed brotherhood of Communism.
Yiddish still flutters in the air
like the ghost of a moth around a streetlamp.
Voices still echo from the alleys
of Krochmolna Street in Warsaw.
Suhl, Menke, Preil—all gone now.
And Herman?—he’s just a figment
of my overwrought imagination.

New York






Joan Digby


TRAPPED

How swift can happiness go?
“Swifter than arrow from Tartar’s bow”
 Arial said.

Then he fled
and left me
in the cleft
of this pine tree.


VOID

You have drifted so far away
that I can no longer detect
even an atom of your voice
or hope that one day
you will appear like a miracle
that I don’t believe in.

My sadness expands
as morning comes later
and evening darkness earlier.

Light and love have vanished
with you and left me void.

New York