CENDRARS TIME

Dos Passos called him
"the son of Homer"
for everyone knows this Swiss bard
was morphing into his misnomer
of a Paris visitor and dynamic author
kissing his listeners on a boulevard
by loving dada in surreal French
who passes us his drawing card
in the park by the river Seine
to make room on our workbench
with his iconic business delivering
a metamorphoses of the avant-garde
in a poetry of reigning success,
Cedrars discloses after the Great War
he is a pacifist,having seen the darkness
amid the stress for a spiritual man
increases as a wonder in promotion
of fueled creative gravity under stars
as in a meteor ring around Mars
from a scene of commotion
in all of Satan's fantastic notions
on foreign fascistic fields
in his vernacular of language,
wishes us a transformation
with arranging human shields
as if a charismatic talisman leaks
words from his own cheeky charm
urging man to finally disarm
in descant of transcendence
for his future cultural descendants
as a charismatic poet in sequences
speaks in a life's parenthesis
searching for truth in dialectical
and pivotal consequences
before a heathen firing squad
with a benchmark to God
penned by in Russia
as"the Legend of Novgorod"
greeting you as a renaissance man
by an old library shelf
he became my friend in residence
putting on an international fragrance
on me in his inventive personality
from an inventive classical history
in stories of chance adventure
with a part in world culture
in your story of Resistance
as an art partisan in war or peace
from a poet lore veneration for us
in this encomium and panegyric
to a gracious poetic glory
this tenacious genius sings
in his vocal twentieth century
seeking a dream story to enchant us
back to King Jesus as hero
beyond Dante's ninth labyrinth
to bring us from a scene of the Inferno
with a Homeric Greek chorus.