Best Woodcut Poems
It was a woodcut in our high school history text, Unit 4 Beginnings of the
Modern World, that so disturbed,
from the Nuremburg Chronicles depicting the burning of the Jews, flat
perspective,
faces of the victims among flames, in no particular agony, not especially
Jewish,
during the Black Death 1/3 of Europe died 1347-1351 alone. Although
you die together you die alone.
Earlier that week, I had attended our 6th grade's performance of Fiddler on
the Roof, thinking
Coltrane should have recorded Matchmaker as a bookend to My
Favorite Things
but as the play darkened
with the town's absorption into the diaspora, democracy
yet unthought of and rule of law a fig leaf for authority
Jasper, who played Zero Mostel, delivered his line well to the effect
you're just doing your jobs while wrecking our lives.
Anyway, nothing like that is happening here, is it?
The gardener planting tomatoes, the gravedigger finding skulls,
there is so much life a little death won't matter.
Jasper
was a beautiful ham,
big as Zero.
A friend posed
this question: must all states be melting pots like the United States?
I said yes
not because they should but since
it's inevitable. Let labor flow like capital!
America was the last word of the play and brought a tear of pride to my
eye.
Immigration, exasperating argument re the Other.
How many's more than enough? 9 billion, a rational,
real number that exceeds or
we're convinced
is within the carrying capacity of the planet.
Climate change is the new Black Death.
I like the Amerindian body type and face mixed in with the European,
African.
The irrepressible economy rolls out reams of logs, ores of elements, bags
of ice, fields of rice.
Embargo. The moon stares, bare, full of interstellar space.
Better a cold shoulder than a visit from our military.
The crazy Nazis must have felt themselves extraordinarily compassionate
toward the mother, earth, the goddess, history, or some such
abstraction and, thus, acted on a fraction of all they did not know.
Selfless soldiers just doing their jobs guarding the border or,
on the other hand, collecting fagots for the burning of the Jews.
The Only Star For Me
It’s my corner coffee shop, Starbucks
The cheer starts here with hot coffee
I’ll get yours, it’s nothing, awe shucks
A home away from home, my family
A blended Frappuccino, at lunch to boast
Make it a Sumatra Arabica venti
Fresh whole coffee beans dark roast
Patrons on Laptops, their cup’s never empty
Macha Latte hot tea, sweet and uplifting
Named after Starbuck, the first mate in Moby Dick
Originally intended on naming the coffeehouse Pequod
after Ahab’s whaleship, the name would not stick
At the brand’s core is the Starbucks siren, odd
The bare-breasted, two-tailed mermaid but
was intended to be as seductive as their coffees
Based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut
The Seattle’s Pike Place logo evolved in the seventies
They unveiled a cleaner image of the mermaid
She was updated, cropped, and repositioned,
so that only above the navel is displayed
we found each other's bodies
in a pile of bodies
writhing and squirming for the light
you were pulling petals off flowers
I was teaching young children how to swear
and in that moment of passion
such beauty, such surprise
that you would come over to my side,
we appeared preserved
as in a woodcut in Death's private study
where his desk was carved
with gargoyle heads and real heads
all open-mouthed and stretched
and I've never seen so many names on lists
and even he couldn't stop all of the light
coming through the blinds,
although I knew it was you,
and the saddest place to sit
is on a kitchen floor
not knowing what words to think