WILL SHAKESPEARE

Portraying in robes
the kings of glory,
unfolding their costumes
of royal linen;
a much cruder story,
when the Tudor plays the grooms
in the Globe's theater rooms;
was Will abiding
or hiding,
as a loyal Elizabethan?

Ben Jonson, Spenser, Marlowe
play out for a genius;
did Will play both sides
to circumvent and choose
his way to a state of mind
as an arbitrary Papal-Catholic
or a Protestant dissident,
with an insolvent government
refusing to disclose
his own bent for mankind.

JERUSALEM

Jerusalem is in the mind
of a favorable hand
on a kind map of orders
you cannot divine its land

except by borders
within the judges
where an able Bible
bares no libel or grudges.

YEATS FACING FINALITY


Crowned with Ireland's
green jewel and motto
a thousand fools
bound to enter your grotto

Non de plume
on an innocent isle
engraved with a dream
a poet in an exiled room.                                    

FASCISM AGAIN

Can you believe

after the Shoah

there is still

an evil doer

next door.

INDIA'S MOMBAI

Cry from body bags
over a ground
sounds of death
not dialogue or hash tags
cry for there no sounds
from dear Hindus or Jews
no sweet breath
on empty mounds.

SARO WIWA

Nigeria's abductions
cry out for help

Sara Wiwa
your wise words

touch us
educate us.

JERUSALEM(to Amichai)


You belong
to the springs
dew in the morning

to a peaceful dawn
lovers who have
returned to your roads

dusted after the rainy
season
by a rainbow sky

along the temple
mount of the future
all are welcoming.

FASCISM 2014

Ailing angry

heavy handed
monster hands

turning over power
to sports thugs

learning nothing
from history.

MANDELSTAM'S REVELATION

Blue lights seen
from armed men
in brigades

two children
brought to the morgue
their faces are ours

in St.Petersburg
sailor comrades are dead
bodies of poems rise up

from the Black Sea
in a resurrection
of Christians and Jewish souls,

Dante in his paradise
on a road back from Purgatory
at the voice of Russia,

cry Osip out for
drowning souls
asking us

to return to verse
as waters crown
you with green laurels

from your baptism of fire
for a new generation
away from civil war quarrels.

JESUS

Being reborn
to long suffering
with a crown of thorns
falls on David's Royal king

Proclaiming captive's liberty
surviving every disgrace
no holy grave hid
his freely saving grace.

APOLOGETICS

When what is thought
opens the divine plan

from Origen, Aquinas to Barth
what is wrought for man

on either side are heretics
at the Protestant or Catholic divide

Holy spirit believers
cannot abide as Herod rules

grieved by his laughing demon
by fanatics in Styx duel

a new age Rilke turned away
yearning for a pagan play

a poet visiting the Greek Apollo
with a peek to follow

Stefan Georg
by his burning torso in his day,

Soren Kierkegaard and Auden
gave theologian regards

letting play the avant guard
yet non partisan and modern.

BRECHT

Always held for libel
in a political way
knew the Bible
from his mother's day

Called un German by the Nazis
and the Un American committees
with all the cold war powers that be
like Charlie Chaplin in this country.

EDITH STEIN

A Carmelite nun
and philosopher
died among her own
not sighted in the Shoah,

When there is a call
from the Lord
long suffering installs
for a King's reward.

JUAN DE LA CRUZ

You were persecuted
by selfish sated souls
from uprooted sinners
who hated your Jewish origin

Jews often are double crossed
by critics of a religious persuasion
who take the time to toll
for a troubled antisemitic occasion

Heine, Disraeli ,Pasternak
had their heads to their back
in every vocation since Jesus
they outlive the Party hack.

MARY

You stand by the cross
by the serpent of sin
Alma, the Messiah's virgin
and your sovereign kin
near the Roman soldiers
playing the dice
He was paying the price
for an offering robe for a King,
with God's government
on your son's shoulders
the sword still pierces you
in every part of the globe
to every long suffering
Gentile and Jew
in your eternal sacrifice.

GOETHE

What a mature mind to poetry
and everlasting nature
beyond Germany's Kultur
its prophetic nomenclature.

PREJUDICE

Prejudice before or after
the last gaseous world war
in a play review or joke
was no laughter's matter
soon Jews are only smoke
as ashes to scatter.

LYNCHINGS

Enough of half baked hatred

toward the African American

slavery being in the skins

of a wicked rough house sin

I marched with Dr. King

down in Washington D.C.

the Boston Globe asked me

for my views after 1963

I learned the Negro anthem
"Lift Every Voice" in my sleep

at a sermon for Jackie Robinson,

Paul Robeson's memory I keep

Yearned for Satchel Paige

Ella Fitzgerald and Armstrong
as jazz pitched to engage us

hitched to a good sports song.

KIERKEGAARD

Writing a Sunday sermon

in a search for the Son

at church for the truth

of the second person

For the truth is suffering

Soren studying in ministry

the life a Royal king

in the way of His misery

who in the Trinity

died on a back yard tree

with every sin's regard

for man's lack of loyalty

Jesus leaving heaven

on earth's rising from the dead

in a rebirth chosen on a cross

at Passover's feast
of unleavened bread

Eli Eli he cried to the Lord

to accompany his salvation
believing at Mount Calvary

for his merciful precious nation.

MARLOWE

No one understood
Marlowe in his quest
for poetry's throne
among the lost
as a poet in the wood,
a guest in his manifesto
who double-crossed
his ego becoming manifest
from his own brotherhood,
wondering at his dry bones
in an underground alone
wishing to have a crown
of laurel instead of stone,
he was to endear trouble
a wanderlust and double life
of woeful political quarrel
with magical endangered strife
in a devilish sway,
yet it was to Shakespeare
that was conferred in his day
the wonderful power
in a  lyrical way
as words to flower in play,
for Christopher Marlowe
knifes in a rivals loyalty
or falsifies his death
in his martial law league
with his once enemy
holding revenge on his breath
on this intrigue's hour
to show his personal power,
now on his knees
for a day long rife
with English royalty,
then in turn among
selfish murderers
with a raging brutality
as Marlowe burns with hate
for his own god's disloyalty
about his British cognoscenti,
as if he were to war on red Mars
he yearns to ease and hide
the arbitrary state
of his own literary scars,
among the martyrs who died
on learning his Roman fate
like the author of Brutus
among Romulus and Remus
on this planet of his stars.

KING DAVID

With no hair on your chin
being only a kid
he lives without want
in the pleasant outdoors,
hidden in the country caves
to protect him
from his many enemies
among the birds of nature
and the peasant lures,
David is taught forgiveness
amid a Royal household
among the gall of sin,
he is maturely sanguine
and bold in loyalty
given the call and sword
for the Lord is holy
and will reward,
playing the harp's strings
to calm mad King Saul
in psalm and hymn
on mount Zion he sings,
while murdering a lion
who roars and a bear
knowing the Lord is willing
to be there for him
even in his gentle breath
after killing off Goliath
with his slings
he knows what only
the soul can tell,
listening to Samuel's
prophetic words
knowing in friendship
with Jonathan confers
on a love that is greater
than any sticky fleshly girds
yet in secret in a heap
of trouble with a just Uriah
but it was to Bathsheba
in lust to naked desire
that God gave you over
to righteous regret
in a judgment of words,
yet you still worship Him
for in your priestly line
was to be Jesus Messiah
in a government
covering all the earth
who will bring justice
and divine rebirth.

THE ROMANTICS

When words meant love
and heroic action was wise
no stoic chance of nature
bent satisfaction to their eyes,

Believing they were part
of a freely connected history
the art of Keats, Wordsworth
revolutionary Byron, Shelley,

From France's commune station
and impassion of Baudelaire
earth's filiation from Rimbaud
continues to birth our generation,

As Whitman embraced a venture
away from any Darwinian elite
emerging poet faces of evolution
from the galleys of the Beat.

BONHOEFFER'S AMERICA

Bonhoeffer visited 

a black Harlem church

where he sensed joy

then returned

to then Nazi Germany

becoming a mythical Troy

he helped by words

destroy.

IRELAND'S MULDOON

As the poet docks
on a Rob Southey search
for a Plymouth rock
cornucopia community
the "Pantisocracy" utopia
traveled to MADOC,
now continue your journey
on Paul Muldoon's map
in a communal search
for passage to a country
beyond any Atlantis
fascist plutocracy
guessing to be free
without a moneyed currency
away from any recalls
for a company corporation
of myopia's corpulency
a sea worthy mitzvah,
go find and observe
its stationary dystopia.````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

HONGDU

I sing my small song to you
above the China Sea
in all lands we love Hongdu
of the Tang dynasty
when we are sail alone
or on bending knee
a turtle dove among stones
while planting our myrtle tree.

LARKIN

Light in bottles
along a stationary sea
turtles overturned
like myrtle amicably

overcast by England's rain
with visionary eyes on shore
the past old island behaves
as inaudible waves surface for.

BZ NIDITCH

Sometimes my eyes imagine
living in digital time or space
spinning my own original sin
in face of religion,skin or race

But this was a wake up to me
to refuse my own corrupting
only our God, Muse or fate
chooses our state of being,

Deciding to act in my own plays
like Marlowe or Shakespeare
hide my inimical youthful fears
to shout down critical solo years,

By designing my costumes
from an Attic truth of histories
to groom my own lyrical tragedy
divining a Hamletic soliloquy,

Wishing for a body of thinking
to search like a Kierkegaard
freely taking a modern shot at
Auden' s church of avant garde,

But like Lot we cannot go back
to so much long suffering
being a savant, servant, sot
or as a wronged Dutch king,

or David in a breath of a stone
as a kid will awake and sing
when Goliath aches and falls
from a favored shot and sling,

What poetic energy and anxiety
in Juan de la Cruz's attitude
muses on his dark night behavior
wishes a Savior's beatitude.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

Oh to be a knight
or even as a forbidden page

hidden at court in sight
or a poet's monitor on stage

that at this middle age no fool
verse seems to write,not rule

from New English first breaths
my wish for Elizabeth to carry on.

QUEEN ELIZABETH 1

We respect language
connecting every other being
refusing to make a mad scene
in front of a queen or king

Actors perfect their stance
with cleverness on the royal stage
scenes from every circumstance
we suspect bares a loyal page,

Remember the Tudors
with Essex and Raleigh
courtiers and paramours
love has its own folly,

When Sir Walter introduced
the poet Southey to court
then heady verse boasted
as cover to seduce support,

An age we call Shakespearean
with so much partisan loss
a reformation chose a renaissance
over substance in wine and cross.

QUENTIN MASSYS


A revelation sent
as an artistic creator
from the Dutch Master
of the Entombment
and the Virgin
only God is greater
than what is painted
from his own touch of sin.

YESENIN

When ever we need
a consolation
Sergei you are to heed
our lyrical universe

Take us in a musical
Russian verse
to a whole creation
without its curse.

1939

Bombs of propaganda

  from Berlin
   
and soon displacement

replacement

effacement of peoples

toward death

as Hades tries its mob

rule under thumb.

LIDICE

The murderers
   have not the nameless
inner boundaries
  blinded by history
   who in speech
will still have butterflies
 to fly over our heads
in the spring
of the righteous.

PROUST

Some days
 which are in birth pains
of creation
   and we do not know where
is an outcome to our lives
or worth our aversion
    in distrust of ourselves
 we open your pages, Marcel
   and marvel at immortal
language
and escape to your memory.

ee cummings

snatching words

in a picture lexicon

made American verse

spilling over to sing

renderings tincture

from another generation's

romantic ink universe con

without thinking ee cummings.

RICHARD EDWARDS 1545-1556

Poet of interludes and music
may have been a son in
Henry Eighth's blood line
in our classical music
and comedy
he was to shine.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Every play on words

by a sensitive sentence

stays with us

like Greek chorus.

GRUNEWALD


In your suffering
  is the paint
of a Crucifixion's
saint.

ORADOUR


Fascism cannot conquer
     France
 her demon coats
always try to have a chance
to try it on
but  the sun's
enlightening wisdom
has the last dance.

LOWELL

Mania snatches

your recollections

of historical figures

Homer ,Pasternak,

Montale, Baudelaire

as a step brother

of revelations.

EVERY DAY

Every day in shorts
in the sports locker room
my rocking neighbor
uses the treadmill
puts stuff in his eyes
mouth, private parts
filling pills, vitamins,
muscles with steroids
things for hemorroids
while a lone poet gave up
on his upstarted body life
to fulfill his trophy cups
while he was unemployed
and roughly in a void,
with so much strife
using the mind of Freud,
together with Minerva
his wife in the arts
to chart and serve
while fulfilling
his own smarts.

FORD MADOX FORD

You changed

 names but we recognize

the eye on the pages

of "Good Soldier"

and "Parade's End"

did Ford contribute knowledge

when you met Robert Lowell

to the poet's own "Imitations"

and to his pacifist trend.

Every Worship Day

Every worship day hearing
     the opera from new york

always without censorship
with friends "Don't be a jerk"

after solfegio, string lessons
offending on a religious day

asking members of the tribe
if we wanted to return to Him,

"Leave your obligato and obligations
forget the buffa for life's sake

take up your fork and knife
for the buffet and steak."

         

KUROSAWA

Every day
 for years
 you capture me
 in your films
   no way did I miss out
on double features
hiding on back seats
sneaking in easily and early
with my stringed instrument
after school
in the old art theater
on Symphony road
to watch your genius
after school
like a silent adolescent
eating into a mind's myth
of adventure after venture
reading a great velocity
of history in language clips
trying to catch the spirit
in your powerful grip
as an early light of the matinee
projects a new transparency.

FIVE FRAGMENTS

Words as music
  Dmitri  searching for roots
  you wrote in one day
a primary  voice heaving
 into a   memory's recall
 through the unaware  shade
    underground and peaks
 a strong play of breathless
   unconquered listening
with my soul's merging
    into a Russian mine shaft
of words as  gesture
 as the  melodious translated
 notes unsettled troubled
  into white light sign language
a world tonal sound agitation
of a metronome of dialects.

LEM

In science fiction you are
chased out of an uncarved Golem

from the star giants of diction
there is Stanislaw Lem

A genius warned me
beginning in the novel "Eden"

when in "Polaris" from outer space
to spy on an international citizen.

RISING IN SAN FRANCISCO


A time of bitter herbs
in the city of lights
driving through suburbs
in mendacity of blight

A hailstorm passes over
outlasting my hotel shadow
the sunshine warms
my uncoupled fright

An accident to my right
from a sideways swipe
and seeing a mocking bird
takes to a black sky in flight

One daily drop of music
on the classic musical dial
and my lyrical mind plays
no limit on a critical smile,

For my direction is a loss
waiting in a half hour
to find the exit connection
in a laughter of a shower.

SPANISH POETS

My heart is always yours,
Aleixandre and Neruda

for your Thirties cause
Hernandez and Lorca,

Drawn into a dove's peace
underneath a partisan Picasso

may your art days of memory
like mountain snow increase.

AUSTRALIAN LES MURRAY

When in Melbourne
under the sun's glory
we ask why we are born
in the long lost story

On Sydney streets
words come across
like thunder
a rainbow at our feet

In Brisbane
we harbor our thoughts
in wonder
we are overwrought

You have taught a man
with the gift to praise
inland ,outback, island
lifted about Aussie ways.

AUSTRALIA'S AD HOPE

Renew and enlighten us
in days of rain
when we are frightened to
endure the May in vain

Make us as wellspring
rid of all loss and pain
crisscross the wood
of your quatrain

The failure of darkness
to perceive the night
to say yes
and believe in light

A.D. in language
knew of our sin's failure
yet he in century's age
was the sage of Australia.

CANADA'S ATWOOD

Walking by Harvard

bookstore in visibility

for a printed horizon

informing and imparting

words phrased

conjured up from a voice
 
of imaginative being

honored by

appearing out on the window

which changes images

amazing as glimmering stars

in bound memory.

A  WOMAN PAINTER AND POET

Grandma Moses
  reach out to
Virginia Adair,
 your great works
  committed to share
 when others do not fare

PATER


limpid discovery

of unbounded lecterns

a ladder to gateways

understanding

shattering earth

to heaven's separation

Z HERBERT

A mark of Cogito
 
impressions of  Polish

laughter not ours

eye drops  curl

a field mouse

a moon

naming reality

of an underground poet.

CONTAMINATION

Search dog

and you will find mud

over everyone

no one escapes

the proof of sins

regained as God

on any absence of disclosure

with the presence of sinkholes

drowning a rivers depth

hanging with you at wave lengths.

PAVESE

Like losing your life

in a wavering rainbow

defying fascism

and yourself in a shadow

of love's unfolding betrayal

brooding and mating

in a cosmos and logos

sustaining you

as a migratory sparrow

on a Roman street.

HOLAN

You had gift of words

knew the core of pessimism

you hated scam fascism

you saw through it all

like a master of words

and searched alone

betrayed by a desolation

of private and public

politics of imperialism

on the island of Kampa

alone,

Your daughter Katerina

down syndome

death, alone.

ATTILA JOSZEF


The Danube's poor
 
 minorities

 created from the HOLY
 
ROMAN Empire

 heard you
 
rejoiced some one
 
 spoke for you

now are speechless

POUND

Pounding the expatriate
  pavement, bulls were down
from  the revenge and remnants
left over from the Republic
a pound  of flesh and flies
from Venice's ghetto
  brought to the East End,
Soho, or Greenwich
with fascist mobs and slobs
hating the general will
    and public,surely\not Coriolanus
with Moseley's crowds
all the high art of Cathay
in an admixture and picture
of war's human ashes
civilization in a few books
cashed in english stock and bonds
by the metro stations
'petals on  rainy wet bough'
and the art of Flaubert
and everything external.
rondeau redoubled a cheap pink
fragonard and celine's cheap perfume
a vernal extra read all about in
on the London supplement:
the DEVIL'S FOREIGN AGENT:
mussolini pride, franco's horse hair
 your bouquet  and resume sent to Italy
scaled back on your crazy quasi Hitler
political economic comic theories
 wearies even reactionaries
except the Americans,
who want whitman to love us back.

J. SIEFERT


Rugs at a bazaar
 
outside Prague
 
   Mozart's violin concerto
 
  fresh in my cauliflower ears
 
many folks with umbrellas

  gather a park stand audience

 everyone is going to hear

  the poet Siefert speak

even as it starts to rain

there is no Siefert standing

HOPKINS


Nature is a supernatural
   dove

 more real than tempests
    who fly over our mountain

every day crucified
  of giving out our long suffering
  to locate beauty in worship words

 affirmations in configurations

at each station crossing out

on under grounds of love

FIRBANK

No one out of your camp

   will have an air of pretense

on a play of words

of comedy's high life

 for you saw the underbelly

 of acting up

TS ELIOT

When on a bird watch

    at Cape Ann

I search for you

by the dark waters

amid warbler's speech

you are not distant

from the life's lambent sun.

SONG WITH WORDSWORTH

Romantic notes the songbird

   

remaining with a quote

of words, sleepless footsteps,

on a vine.

CRITICS

 Hardy , you were the first modern poet, how you understood pessimism
and  Donald Davies how you understood Hardy
   TS.Eliot it was through Arthur Symons that introduced us to symbolism   Julian Symonds wrote about it
 Auden a great poet and critic
 CS Lewis a great fantasy writer and apologist

What friends

Drabbles
Durrell   Davenport,  Wilson
Nin, Henry Miller
Ransom  Howard, Hindus, Levin ,(whom I corresponded) Bersani, David Kalstone,Marjorie Perloff,
 
Burke, Bloom, Geoffrey  Hill,  Vendler,(whose lectures I attended,she liked
my poems,) Murdoch ,Marthe Robert, the Mauritains', catholic saints


 what a critic contributes
 to our understanding of the poem
  and the novel is an emotive eye

MILOSZ

Cries

  are war zones

of perpetual words

singling out a century

of falsehoods
 
as hands in the wind

 you  expose tempted angels

with their closed parachuted drops of

political falsehood

to serve for language's integrity.

BERRYMAN


Cannot exist
  without words
  expectations. a child's hands
      trembling
       by urns prepared for 20th
century science like crematoriums

of rolling  snow in atomic dust
as demons      crows
outside the echoes of the timeless

of first finders of my identity
then keepers of my truth
a big part of you

inside your exploding heliotropes

of an East wind

in a descent of emptiness

ELUARD


No force of your love

is unexpected in the Paris sun

the   day spent  in studies
 
in libraries as   sparrows

 fall from the tree roofs

birds nesting

    hours do not move

as you prepare

word bombs for the resistance