showman, jester, juggler of feelings.
Go on, recite your blossoming sunsets,
your crystal-clear seas, your songs
of boy meets girl and love’s eternal plight.
Go on, you’re right.
Who cares what else has been going on
around the world a thousand years,
a century ago, or only yesterday?
Your easy-going happy verses
are eternal, not my long, anxious
broodings.
A rosebud of a girl, pure and cheerful
like a robin in the spring, listening
to my poems, asks “What is Auschwitz?”
Her sister, wide-eyed and pink-cheeked,
wants to know if Stalin is a country
or a man. They both think that Project 2025
is the name of a Staten Island shelter for the homeless,
and though they nonchalantly wear miniskirts
and see-through blouses, take contraceptives,
go to school, to work, and dream of plump
paychecks, vacations, Ph.D.s, they consider
feminism some sort of a disease,
a shameful affliction, while hidden in the closet
my old burnt bra still holds billows of smoke
in its smoldering cups.
Go on, minstrel of light verse, you jester
and kind showman, you are right; there’s nothing
everlastingly worth singing about
but the lovely sea and the moon’s soft sigh.
