Neither in pools of snowmelt,
nor in schools of orderly ideas,
do poems collect;you’ll find
them on the free range of the
imagination, where hell is a corral,
and you’re a feisty mustang’s rider.
Dave Read
Current
Wintertime Blues
Likely a bluejay made the swoop
from roof eave to spruce bough,
and etched a lazy ‘u’ over the field beyond the window.
But the window pane, and the gazer,
are beclouded enough for this artist
of a January thaw to be recorded as a bluebird.
Next winter, the scene becomes a blue balm.
Dave Read
The Next Homer
When poets focus their gaze on
the plight of the poor, benighted poet,
mired in the madding era of mass media,
then, poets ingratiate themselves
To kings, dukes, deans, doges, czars,
popes, imams, emirs, satraps, muftis,
oligarchs, mob bosses, ward healers,
sheriffs, brown nosers, et alia,
And thus abdicate the ancient office
of poet, realm of the next Homer –
self-refreshing heralds of generations.
Dave Read
Our M.O.
Poems start as inklings
on the perpetual scrolls
of poets’ consciousness.
Restless souls, poets’ impatience
with the status quo ignites the
inklings and makes the poems.
Dave Read
white chickens
the slick vinyl blanket
of screens
stifles as it saddens
until
the idea of a free
press
seems only a
dream.
Dave Read
Free Poets Free Poetry
Neither Caesar, nor the Pope, nor the King,
nor Congress (and its librarian), has title
To one of Whitman’s trampled blades,
To a leaf of Dickinson’s silent sheaf,
To a pile of Frost’s war-worn grass,
To one hectare of Stevens’s measured lawn,
To a slip of Williams’s Queen Anne’s lace…
In the new world, free poets make it new.
Here and now, our tongue’s dead, in their old world tombs,
have our fond remembrance, not our obeisance.
Dave Read
Dressing Tennyson
No dressing-down would
Wordsworth bequeath his heir,
Who, unsubtlely, put on the
dead man’s gown, then took
A knee, ‘fore the Queen, who prizes
such submission – it’s good for the show.
Dave Read
Look Up
Raptors, above the trees,
screw themselves over the valley.
Sometimes, a zephyr will impede
or hurl them towards a far darkness.
Eagles needn’t scream to be heard,
nor struggle to make such good time.
Dave Read
Resolution
First, let us consider how
near uniformed America is
to uninformed America.
Now, let us resolve to make
up our own minds – what to
wear, and where to aim.
Dave Read
this just in
either M or S or another M
keeps me posted keeps my eyes
glued to the screens those thin
flat things that mediate my life
back to me
those thin flat
things excite the right cells
and make my imagination do
somersaults at the shapes of
their imagined selfs, off-screen.
Dave Read
Modern American Poetry
In the beginning is the word, and the
Word is with god, and the word is god.
In the 2020s, the word is inert, the word
Is a wad of dough,polished, painted,
Punctured, strung up with a dozen
More to make a faux pearl necklace.
Read a poem, to ease the pain –
Ordain a poet, and make it rain.
Dave Read
Memorial Day
But for tulips or daffodils perhaps,
leave the stone etched with the name of your dead
alone to cast shadows over grass day after day –
And keep a little flag handy to wave at the parade,
or to poke in the eye of politicians who spill blood
as if they only were spending money.
Dave Read
Judging April
April is graded in the northeast by her work
toward the detonation of forsythia, which
converts neighborhood street corners and
Highway interstices into explosions of
sunshine for two weeks, max – and while that
shrub returns to ordinary and ungainly, a good
April hands the baton to May, who gets all the glory!
Dave Read
Good Mount Rushmore
The real one, the Mount Rushmore of the good American mind,
which does not trespass lands of the Sioux,
Beams bright with the likeness of good John Lewis,
the likes of whom America has no right to expect to see again,
Whom Americans fail to emulate at their peril.
Godspeed John Lewis, good rest is your’s; good trouble, our’s.
– Dave Read
Frosted Gloss
Instead of by the fire of desire,
or by the ice of hate,
From what I’ve seen,
America’s bound to succumb,
to lazy and dumb.
– Dave Read
Fire and Ice, Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Hunker Down
From time to time
Father nature pipes in
With an update, or to ground
Us for the weekend, or longer,
To effect the weight of things.
Our resilience becomes crucial –
We find drive we forgot about
And split the day between
Awake and shaken to the core.
Dave Read
Afterparty
We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.
After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.
Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.
Dave Read
self portrait in birthday suit
decades the dawdler, small d dilettante,
big a amateur, master of half a dozen useful/tasty things,
and an even-tempered brooder, to boot!
upon attaining seventy years, the chore is to unpack
cabinets and closets and to scan or riffle scores and scores
of notebooks, lest something worthwhile be lost.
the gift of seventy is humility enough to invoke alchemy,
which can hie the compression of these leaves beyond
the ink black stage straight to the bright and shiny.
Dave Read
We Fined God
Some few hours before a sloe-black sky would feel the prick of the crescent moon, she called my attention to the far ridge, where a blue mist rose over the leafless wood.
For a moment, we discussed the source: smoke? reflection of an unseen pond? but we couldn’t muster the energy – we didn’t amount to enough to care to know.
We had gotten nowhere in no time at all. A luckier couple, much less lovers, would have made up a story out of the blue, delighted by the emergence of Spring, at last.
All we could do was bounce memories off one another, carefully cut and pasted for the telling:
I noted where I first saw a scarlet tanager, but not the girl who was with me then, whose areolae were paler than scarlet; and she pointed to the bench by the pond, smiling in silence at the memory of what went down her last time there.
Ten days into April, some months since our first date, we parted.
It was the year we fined God for keeping Winter out past its due date, back in the library of the mind.
– Dave Read
The Muse Leaps Generations
My generation dropped the ball, big time, sure we levitated the Pentagon for a few seconds, then let it fall back to Earth while in Vietnam the war went on and on until Congress ran out of checks in the middle of the stupid seventies, not during the swinging sixties.
I watched the March for Our Lives on TV and wept wet tears, but felt an immense infusion of Hope to see the Muse leap generations -> Emma Lazarus passes the torch of Liberty to Emma Gonzales.
Sports metaphor is apt because they’re kids who belong in playgrounds on Springtime Saturdays and I’m glad they neither referenced scripture nor said a prayer.
Of course they didn’t, so clearly do they see that the scripture-clipping evangelicals are pleased as punch with the status quo, but Hell no, these kids are fed up and bold as brass and call BS what a nation of Moms and Dads have allowed to happen.
There was no soaring rhetoric, no reference to either biblical or historical slavery, no invocation across the millennia to Abraham, or Moses, or Jesus Christ these kids are fed up and bold as brass and call BS what a nation of Dads and Moms have allowed to happen.
Enough is enough, the torch is passed from Emma Lazarus to Emma Gonzales, do the math America – SIX MINUTES TWENTY SECONDS with an AR-15 adds up to silence to the NRA, made deaf by the noise of coins dropping into their coffin-shaped coffers, silent tongues choke their spokespeople, a tsunami of silence floods the lobbies and hearing rooms of Congress, of K street, of Wall Street, floods the Silicon Valley, swamps the fake White House, the meeting rooms and hideaways, the mirrored halls, elevators, and escalators all morph into escape routes for sycophants and lapdogs who rat out the hopeless, feckless, friendless foe (in the Oval playpen) en route to the Big House.
Dave Read
(2/7/22): This poem has been accepted into the American Jewish Historical Society archive and will live next to the papers of Emma Lazarus.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus