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Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

T.S. Eliot skips Pigalle

Market Forces sinned mortally in the 1920s*
when they boosted the timid patrician, Eliot,
at the expense of the bold physician, Williams.

Thus, America’s windshield is transformed
into a rear-view mirror, where objects never
are as they appear to the naked eye.

T. S. Eliot walked backwards through life –
contrary to the path of sun-worshipping civilisation,
he moved ever eastward, away from newborn

Missouri, and youthful New England, clear
across the sea to ancient Oxford, where non-
American subjects know their places.

A century later, we know that Mr. Eliot
lacked the sort of hands-on training
found readily due east of England.

Though dons and tutors are good for some,
for the lessons needed by young Tom,
the right professor was la madame.

Dave Read

*Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in 1922; William Carlos Williams published Spring and All in 1923.

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

Yankees Noodle

Worn thin, thin as water,
is your terrible beauty, Butler Yeats.

Put down your pen and pick a tool
to raze schools of thought –

Where you are king, prints lead fools.
Pints of poets send pretend aristocrats

And approximate proletarians
down rabbit holes of silent scorn,

Pomp, and circumstance, ermine-robed
under bloody mortarboards.

Will Bogside hold tenured profs.,
tho neither man, nor nation, be -hooded?

Once idled shamrocks quake anew,
We darn yankees noodle O’Donnell Abu.

Dave Read

O’Donnell Abu lyrics courtesy of Wikipedia:

Proudly the note of the trumpet is sounding;
Loudly the war cries arise on the gale;
Fleetly the steed by Lough Swilly is bounding,
To join the thick squadrons on Saimear’s green vale.
On, ev’ry mountaineer,
Strangers to flight or fear,
Rush to the standard of dauntless Red Hugh.
Bonnaught and Gallowglass,
Throng from each mountain pass.
On for old Erin, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Princely O’Neill to our aid is advancing
With many a chieftain and warrior clan.
A thousand proud steeds in his vanguard are prancing
‘Neath the borderers brave from the Banks of the Bann:
Many a heart shall quail
Under its coat of mail.
Deeply the merciless foeman shall rue
When on his ears shall ring,
Borne on the breeze’s wing,
Tír Chonaill’s dread war-cry, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Wildly o’er Desmond the war-wolf is howling;
Fearless the eagle sweeps over the plain;
The fox in the streets of the city is prowling–
All who would scare them are banished or slain!
Grasp ev’ry stalwart hand
Hackbut and battle brand–
Pay them all back the debt so long due;
Norris and Clifford well
Can of Tirconnell tell;
Onward to glory–“O’Donnell abú!”

Sacred the cause that Clan Connell’s defending–
The altars we kneel at and homes of our sires;
Ruthless the ruin the foe is extending–
Midnight is red with the plunderer’s fires.
On with O’Donnell then,
Fight the old fight again,
Sons of Tirconnell,
All valiant and true:
Make the false Saxon feel
Erin’s avenging steel!
Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!”

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

A Poet’s Dose

Emily Dickinson knew her’s to a T –
Walt Whitman’s was the same as our’s.

Good Edgar Allen Poe’s was bad, finally.

Dave Read

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

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.

Filed Under: Current, Pinball at Cafe Pantheon, Poems

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

Filed Under: Current, Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

Eagle Pond Farm Market

For David Giannini

Before snow on your grave,
your life work was on the market.

Yankee thrift, the force that drives
your generations.

Your spirit called in a chit, so
your friends bought the place –

Lock, stock, and barrell,
Ox Cart and Glenwood stove.

Your chapter cycles seasons amid
the dead calm of Mt. Kearsarge.

– Dave Read

Donald Hall's Ox Cart
Donald Hall’s Ox Cart
Donald Hall estate sale

The first people in line at Donald Hall’s estate sale in Wilmot waited about fifteen hours overnight to get in the door. (Britta Greene, New Hampshire Public Radio)

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

Awaken Yeats

I’m no scholar, but it seems to me
that Yeats has it wrong,
or at least upside down, when he
Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

The sky’s not for walking, William Butler,
and “don’t tread on my dreams”
sounds too precious by half. But wait –
wouldn’t Maud Gunne stride instead?

Dreams that linger long enough
for metaphor lose their airiness –
they drop from gossamer to lead.

Dave Read

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

– William Butler Yeats

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

Sale of Myself

The emancipation of American slaves
was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln,

An American who did the right thing,
at the right time, for the right reason.

Treason followed, the treacherous flourish yet,
in the land Honest Abe would feel queer in,

In the land that lauds liars, where the consumer
(née citizen) swallows lie after lie after lie.

Dave Read

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon, Poems

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Indifference, of Bob Dylan’s Significance

…I drove down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell…
– William Stafford, from Across Kansas
So long as he rides the wave of American music
as it rises in the Delta, in the Piedmont, in the Panhandle,

So long as he raises the questions that bubble beneath
the surface wherever shell-shocked citizens collect,

Bob Dylan songs ring true, so long as they comport
with Common Sense, Bob Dylan songs ring a bell.

But, when he finds red stripes in the American flag*
and sets out to alert his beleaguered sisters and brothers

That unseen actors wreak havoc, Bossman says no,
that song must go, but you can stay Bob Dylan, you can stay, just

So long as you play in the space laid aside for Minstrels and Rogues,
for Beatles and Jesters, where the Song ‘n Dance man rules the roost.

Dave Read

*CBS revoked its invitation for Bob Dylan to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in May, 1963, because Dylan wanted to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Thus allowed to gestate in the shadows, the John Birch Society morphed into today’s Republican Party. Remember kids, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

Bob Dylan disclaims use of the Welsh poet’s name; we lifted from this Dylan Thomas title: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Across Kansas

My family slept those level miles
but like a bell rung deep till dawn
I drove down an aisle of sound,
nothing real but in the bell,
past the town where I was born.

Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more; what the light
struck told a self, every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate –

My state still dark, my dream to long to tell.

– William Stafford

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

The Lush Sin of h.a.m.

honeyboy andrew meade read Prufrock
stem to stern, like a pilot reads wind –
Winds up seeing therein a post-rock
Sub-genre scene. So, he buys in

To test a thesis and see whether Eliot means
To display one rock upon another, until the racket
enriches the tone-deaf, then deals a black ace to
the knave in the nave, where plain folk sing mass.

Alternately, he allows it’s not unlikely that our good trans –
Atlantic man shows, merely, a cast of lynx in spanx.

Dave Read

Filed Under: Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

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