MARIONETTES, 2006
Let the boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader, and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
- Robinson Jeffers, (“Be Angry at the Sun”)
Let them spend their way to Washington –
to alabaster banquets of buttered lobster
garnished with garlic and parsley, let them
sip ambrosial nectar like hummingbirds
from golden thimbles with their initials
at every convocation of re-elected intellect
they might muster – let them play
like deities at the reflection pool
braiding one another’s hair between affairs
with mortals, let them trade half-truths
for half-deception, half-a-heart
for half an ego’s bounty, let them parade,
pontificate and claim the stage
of Mt. Olympus – but let them believe
that threads are invisible, that we cannot see
the web that moves the limbs and lips
of politics, that we cannot follow
and eventually connect them.
BARNYARD
We are at war
with Mexico – to
please her fancy –
-William Carlos Williams, (“Another Old Woman”)
It’s hard on the heart
to keep the blood up –
flexing like Banties
in the barnyard –
yet she enlists us
to crow and wake the troops
from the roost of trees.
Battles brief,
the old bulls bluff
or claim a distant oak –
they walk to work
as the young ones run
one after another.
Is it fair to question
the gray hairs who
manage her affairs,
has she grown senile?
What favors left
has she to offer
but the insatiable
nightmare?
Perhaps she has hooked us
to bigger fish
than we can land.
Williams’ poem, as follows, triggered my take-off on a familiar theme, yet I tried to maintain the sense of native patriotism common to both Williams and Jeffers. - J