506 History and politics poems

Proem. Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie, Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime, And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time. So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence, The sound thereof raps every human sense That men account it no impiety To say thou wert a fleshly Deity. Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date) Thy world of honours to accumulate. ‘Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse, ‘Mine bleating stands before thy royal Hearse. Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdain, T’ accept the tribute of a loyal Brain. Thy clemency did yerst esteem as much The acclamations of the poor, as rich, Which makes me deem, my rudeness is no wrong, Though I resound thy greatness ‘mongst the throng. The Poem. No Phoenix Pen, nor Spenser’s Poetry, No Speed’s, nor Camden’s learned History; Eliza’s works, wars, praise, can e’re compact, The World’s the Theater where she did act. No memories, nor volumes can contain, The nine Olymp’ades of her happy reign, Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise, From all the Kings on earth she won the prize. Nor say I more than truly is her due. Millions will testify that this is true. She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdom lack to play the Rex. Spain’s Monarch sa’s not so, not yet his Host: She taught them better manners to their cost. The Salic Law had not in force now been, If France had ever hop’d for such a Queen. But can you Doctors now this point dispute, She’s argument enough to make you mute, Since first the Sun did run, his ne’er runn’d race, And earth had twice a year, a new old face; Since time was time, and man unmanly man, Come shew me such a Phoenix if you can. Was ever people better rul’d than hers? Was ever Land more happy, freed from stirs? Did ever wealth in England so abound? Her Victories in foreign Coasts resound? Ships more invincible than Spain’s, her foe She rack’t, she sack’d, she sunk his Armadoe. Her stately Troops advanc’d to Lisbon’s wall, Don Anthony in’s right for to install. She frankly help’d Franks’(brave) distressed King, The States united now her fame do sing. She their Protectrix was, they well do know, Unto our dread Virago, what they owe. Her Nobles sacrific’d their noble blood, Nor men, nor coin she shap’d, to do them good. The rude untamed Irish she did quell, And Tiron bound, before her picture fell. Had ever Prince such Counsellors as she? Her self Minerva caus’d them so to be. Such Soldiers, and such Captains never seen, As were the subjects of our (Pallas) Queen: Her Sea-men through all straits the world did round, Terra incognitæ might know her sound. Her Drake came laded home with Spanish gold, Her Essex took Cadiz, their Herculean hold. But time would fail me, so my wit would too, To tell of half she did, or she could do. Semiramis to her is but obscure; More infamy than fame she did procure. She plac’d her glory but on Babel’s walls, World's wonder for a time, but yet it falls. Fierce Tomris(Cirus’ Heads-man,Sythians’ Queen) Had put her Harness off, had she but seen Our Amazon i’ th’ Camp at Tilbury, (Judging all valour, and all Majesty) Within that Princess to have residence, And prostrate yielded to her Excellence. Dido first Foundress of proud Carthage walls (Who living consummates her Funerals), A great Eliza, but compar’d with ours, How vanisheth her glory, wealth, and powers. Proud profuse Cleopatra, whose wrong name, Instead of glory, prov’d her Country’s shame: Of her what worth in Story’s to be seen, But that she was a rich Ægyptian Queen. Zenobia, potent Empress of the East, And of all these without compare the best (Whom none but great Aurelius could quell) Yet for our Queen is no fit parallel: She was a Phoenix Queen, so shall she be, Her ashes not reviv’d more Phoenix she. Her personal perfections, who would tell, Must dip his Pen i’ th’ Heliconian Well, Which I may not, my pride doth but aspire To read what others write and then admire. Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason. But happy England, which had such a Queen, O happy, happy, had those days still been, But happiness lies in a higher sphere. Then wonder not,Eliza moves not here. Full fraught with honour, riches, and with days, She set, she set, like Titan in his rays. No more shall rise or set such glorious Sun, Until the heaven’s great revolution: If then new things, their old form must retain, Eliza shall rule Albian once again. Her Epitaph. Here sleeps T H E Queen, this is the royal bed O’ th’ Damask Rose, sprung from the white and red, Whose sweet perfume fills the all-filling air, This Rose is withered, once so lovely fair: On neither tree did grow such Rose before, The greater was our gain, our loss the more. Another. Here lies the pride of Queens, pattern of Kings: So blaze it fame, here’s feathers for thy wings. Here lies the envy’d, yet unparallel’d Prince, Whose living virtues speak (though dead long since). If many worlds, as that fantastic framed, In every one, be her great glory famed.

The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle. But a raving autumn shears Blossom from the summer's wreath; The older is condemned to death, Pardoned, drags out lonely years Conspiring among the ignorant. I know not what the younger dreams – Some vague Utopia – and she seems, When withered old and skeleton-gaunt, An image of such politics. Many a time I think to seek One or the other out and speak Of that old Georgian mansion, mix Pictures of the mind, recall That table and the talk of youth, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle. Dear shadows, now you know it all, All the folly of a fight With a common wrong or right. The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time; Arise and bid me strike a match And strike another till time catch; Should the conflagration climb, Run till all the sages know. We the great gazebo built, They convicted us of guilt; Bid me strike a match and blow.

He didn’t know, King Kleomenis, he didn’t dare— he just didn’t know how to tell his mother a thing like that: Ptolemy’s demand, to guarantee their treaty, that she too go to Egypt and be held there as a hostage— a very humiliating, indecorous thing. And he would be about to speak yet always hesitate, would start to tell her yet always stop. But the magnificent woman understood him (she’d already heard some rumors about it) and she encouraged him to get it out. And she laughed, saying of course she’d go, happy even that in her old age she could be useful to Sparta still. As for the humiliation—that didn’t touch her at all. Of course an upstart like the Lagid couldn’t possibly comprehend the Spartan spirit; so his demand couldn’t in fact humiliate a Royal Lady like herself: mother of a Spartan king.

House of five fires, you never raised me. Those nights when the throat of the furnace wheezed and rattled its regular death, I wanted your wide door, your mottled air of bark and working sunlight, wanted your smokehole with its stars, and your roof curving its singing mouth above me. Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers, and their low laughter measured harmony or strife. Here I could wake amazed at winter, my breath in the draft a chain of violets. The house I left as a child now seems a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder banging at the back door. My eyes burn from cat urine under the basement stairs and the hall reveals a nameless hunger, as if without a history, I should always walk the cluttered streets of this hapless continent. Thinking it best I be wanderer, I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag, every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name, shaking in a solitary landscape, like the last burnt leaf on an oak. What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting? House of five fires, they take you for a tomb, but I know better. When desolation comes, I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine and melt into crow call, reminding my children that spiders near your door joined all the reddening blades of grass without oil, hasp or uranium.

They are building a ship in a field much bigger than I should have thought sensible. When it is finished there will never be enough of them to carry it to the sea and already it is turning rusty.

a sentimental curator has placed two fragments of bronze Grecian heads together boy and girl so that the faces black- ened by the three thousand years of desert sand & sun seem to be whispering something that the Gurgan lion & the wing- ed dog of Azerbaijan must not hear but I have heard them as I hear you now half way around the world so simply & so quietly more like a child than like a woman making love say to me in that soft lost near and distant voice I’m happy now I’m happy oh don’t move don’t go away.

What did we suffer for? why did we flee our houses as if we had been hostages at our own tables? Even free, we were not free, we kept breaking down in thrift stores, our eyes tearing in bins of glasses taken from the faces of the dead; disoriented and dizzy as crows swarming the corpses of our own hearts, in the aisles of the department stores filled with the glitter of plenty, we kept spilling coffee on ourselves. Why are we forever afraid of bathtubs, of water hitting us in the face like the invisible stoning of an anonymous crowd, why does buying makeup make us feel guilty, why do we eat our food like thieves? Why do we sneak our friends in the back door and make our love climb up a tree? Why do our lies nest within one another like diminishing dolls? Why do we jump when the smallest child pushes open a door? Why are we afraid of the whistling of teapots? Who’s coming in to read over our shoulders our most secret thoughts, who’s clinging to our roofs like a demon? Why is his cheerfulness even more frightening than his anger? Why does my hope burn like the scar of a burn on my breast? Why are you an eye floating in a pool of dead water, blue; and unable to breathe? Why do we keep asking why? How do we know how to stop it if we don’t know why it began? How can we unravel so much violence followed by so much lie? How will we know when it’s ever over? or believe it will ever stop?

I scratch earth around timpsila on this hill, while below me, hanging in still air, a hawk searches the creekbed for my brothers. Squat leaves, I’ll braid your roots into such long ropes, they’ll cover the rump of my stallion. Withered flower, feed us now buffalo rot in the waist-high grass. Hear my sisters laugh? They dream of feasts, of warriors to owl dance with them when this war is over. They don’t see our children eating treebark, cornstalks, these roots. Their eyes gleam in shallow cheeks. The wagon people do not think relationship is wealth. Sisters, last night the wind returned my prayer, allowing me to hear Dog Soldiers singing at Ash Hollow. I threw away my blanket stained with lies. Above the wings of my tipi, I heard the old woman in Maka Sica sigh for us. Then I knew the distance of High Back Bone’s death- fire from another world away. Even they may never stop its motion. Yesterday at noon, I heard my Cheyenne sister moan as she waded through deep snow before soldiers cut up her corpse to sell as souvenirs. Are my brothers here? Ghosts bring all my joy. I walk this good road between rock and sky. They dare not threaten with death one already dead.

The land was there before us Was the land. Then things Began happening fast. Because The bombs us have always work Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us. Because Us has saved the world. Us gave it A particular set of regulations Based on 1) undisputable acumen. 2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately Referred to here as “bull market” And (of course) other irrational factors Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps, Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc

A girl stalked a sheep in a field. The sheep began to bleed & the whole field smelled like carnage. A butcher had moved in and slaughtered the sheep. Red, the stain on her dress. Empty, her basket. The depletion of resources winter sowed — the house on the hill in disrepair. In the vacated house, the girl tried to flush the blood down the toilet but the infrastructure couldn’t completely erase the evidence of life. The girl studied Islamic history, the origin of arithmetic. The stain turned the girl into a lady in her country’s blighted first-world landscape. History’s pages were open, one by one they ripped. When she asked the spout for water, it rusted. She grew cold. She grew weary. She grew sad. If only she could ban the butcher in solidarity with the bad children, the refugees and outcasts. Instead she drove into the city, the urban sprawl swallowing her. She went into a store, got caught stealing a candy bar. Surveillance footage showed she had no remorse. She justified:We all live on stolen land. Why not one bar of chocolate, subsidized?