505 History and politics poems

The library of congress holds every book published in america since 1870 every thought anyone thought worth printing walking through it i felt small in the right way

Once there ruled in the distant city of Wirani a king who was both mighty and wise.  And he was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom. Now, in the heart of that city was a well, whose water was cool and crystalline, from which all the inhabitants drank, even the king and his courtiers; for there was no other well. One night when all were asleep, a witch entered the city, and poured seven drops of strange liquid into the well, and said, “From this hour he who drinks this water shall become mad.” Next morning all the inhabitants, save the king and his lord chamberlain, drank from the well and became mad, even as the witch had foretold. And during that day the people in the narrow streets and in the market places did naught but whisper to one another, “The king is mad.  Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Surely we cannot be ruled by a mad king.  We must dethrone him.” That evening the king ordered a golden goblet to be filled from the well.  And when it was brought to him he drank deeply, and gave it to his lord chamberlain to drink. And there was great rejoicing in that distant city of Wirani, because its king and its lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

"The Woman of Progressive Intellect (Intellectural), 1914," by August Sander If it were not for her enlightened eyes, She’d be the witch that intellect denies Has ever walked the earth: the sunken jaw, The blunt chin like a claw-toothed hammer’s claw, The stubbed and crooking finger, and the skin As stained and crinkly as her crinoline, Would make a loving grandchild run away. It takes another kind of love to see How spirit, in its tactical withdrawal From aging outworks that are doomed to fall, Consents to the bewitching of its shell As long as it can hold the citadel Where the progressive intellect has spent A lifetime plotting the enlightenment The backward and the beautiful dismiss As mind’s revenge for its unloveliness.

In the mud of a tire rut, we were the filaments. We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music on Spiro’s flute we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops would liquefy. The trees shook with the throb of steel. What did we do to be so red, white, and blue? We were inexorable like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi to the Jacksonian grass. We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine, the daughters of the gray flannel suit. And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun he was all teeth and amp and what were we?

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth, Babylon and Rome. Not Paris raped tall Helen, But this incestuous worm, Who lured her vivid beauty To his amorphous sleep. England! famous as Helen Is thy bethothal sung. To him the shadowless, More amorous than Solomon.

O Friend! I know not which way I must look For comfort, being, as I am, opprest, To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom! — We must run glittering like a brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.

Oh Fortune, thy wresting wavering state Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit, Whose witness this present prison late Could bear, where once was joy’s loan quit. Thou causedst the guilty to be loosed From bands where innocents were inclosed, And caused the guiltless to be reserved, And freed those that death had well deserved. But all herein can be nothing wrought, So God send to my foes all they have thought.

Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym. Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot. He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery, Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead. We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead. The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial— gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse:Pour out Thy wrath upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob. May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found! My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic. Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy. My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners, says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places? My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider, sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral, her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like that they don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker— my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms.Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben. Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was.Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived.Der vind voyet. The wind howls, says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember, but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?

You say, Columbus with his argosies Who rash and greedy took the screaming main And vanished out before the hurricane Into the sunset after merchandise, Then under western palms with simple eyes Trafficked and robbed and triumphed home again: You say this is the glory of the brain And human life no other use than this? I then do answering say to you: The line Of wizards and of saviours, keeping trust In that which made them pensive and divine, Passes before us like a cloud of dust. What were they? Actors, ill and mad with wine, And all their language babble and disgust.