Finally Did the Trick

At forty-one

I was nearly cured

Of skyscrapers – September

One year before almost

To the day I laughed

At myself caught

In a revolving door

After lunch beneath

The World Trade Center –

Where I laughed lightly

Turned burned steel and ash

The memory didn’t quite do it

At sixty-two

Though distant and filtered

Through TV news

You’d think the slaughter

At My Lai or Rwanda or Ukraine

Would cure me of any

Remote hope for humanity

The tragic inertia deadly

Incompetence and cowardice –

The demolished little bodies

At Sandy Hook and Uvalde

Finally did the trick

       

                                                                                                                  

Silence

For those sages

Lao or Chuang Tzu

(Maybe even Siddhartha)

Silence came naturally

Nirvana turned slowly

Silence now requires

The unattainable –

Far too much patience

To be at all effective

To have any impact

Upon our lives

Our intricate elaborately

Constructed karma

The well-intentioned

Vows of silence

Of monks and nuns

In serene monasteries

Seem quaint but futile

Solutions to the clamor

Of a peevish throng

And I am thinking

Anymore silence

Is rather irresponsible

A reckless wu-wei

An obsequious inaction

All spins too swiftly

Suffering too pervasive

Comes hard and fast

Though priceless

We’ve run out of time

For mute circumspection

To adequately flourish

Despite Khrushchev

When we were two

October 1962

JFK on the TV

Moms and dads around us

Must have made love

Despite Khrushchev Castro

And missiles – in beds

Whispering and wondering

Designing elaborate bomb

Shelters in their heads

In our first year that

Sizzling upstairs apartment

We made love never

Getting enough of the other

On our mattress lugged

Into the front room for AC

We gaped at our tiny TV

A man despite his shopping

Bags stopping the tanks

Stopping the party

In Tiananmen Square

When the towers fell

NYC ash in our TV now

Annihilation not so distant

We went to work to school

And made love tenderly

Tended our kids despite

Daycare lawncare taxes

Mortgage utilities insurance –

No time for terrorists

Lurking beneath our bed

Eventual empty nesters

Ukraine and tanks again

Bombs blood despair

Just another despot

Still we fret over the TV

Wish we were young enough to

Join an International Brigade

Still safe in our bed

Whispering and wondering

We make love despite

Our aches and pains.

                                                                                                           

Lucky Window Table

On the morning of

Ukraine’s invasion

Before cluster bombs

Aromas of burned

Tanks schools hospitals

Russian soldiers

Bewildered boys yet

To warm to brutality

Grandmas and grandpas

Wielding Kalashnikovs

Yet defiant in donning

Yellow and blue and blood

Women children babies

Pressed into trains

Crying screaming dying

Over unwonted catastrophe

We brunch in Oberlin

We snag a lucky

Window table

But we are distracted

Anxious watching waiters’

Enormous round trays

Feasts flying overhead

Or plates queued up

On lavish sleeves

Maneuver around patrons

Through two narrow doors

Up steep precarious stairs

We forebode – worry over

Impending tragedy

Spills and broken dishes

Any other day

Our silly apprehension

Would be amusing

No Quaint Choo Choo

No quaint choo choo

This train isn’t that

“Little Engine That Could”

This train keeps coming

Coming and coming

Pushing and shoving

And in its insistence

There is nothing else

But power steel gears

Huffing grunting roaring

A sadist thrusting

Through field forest town

Renting our sleep

Deep in the night

The deer know its death

Know to avoid its path

Know its inevitability

But Gary steps in front

Of this train anyway

His despair a long time

Coming and coming

He thought, “I think

I can I think I can”

Relying upon momentum

To accomplish his oblivion

What a shame – what a mess!

The horrific image takes

A toll on the engineer

Despair comes for him

Keeps coming and coming

After three the tragedy

A routine – his heart

Must lean upon indifference

Who has the honor of scooping

Up Gary’s little pieces?

Who has the privilege

Of calling upon his wife?

What will his children do

With this stark obituary?

Was there any good in this?

Was a bone – a small morsel

Of flesh left – Gary a repast

For crawling scavengers?

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.

Spring has come to besieged Leningrad. It seemed that our neighbor’s prophecy was beginning to come true. My mother is in the hospital all the time. Apart from my mother, there are four of us left at home: my older sister Masha and brother Alexey, me and my younger brother Sasha. There has been no news from my father and brothers for several weeks, and we have been sick for the second week and do not go to school.

One of these days, there was a loud knock on our door (since the beginning of 1942, we have introduced the practice of closing doors, including the story of Baba Katya). As I was already recovering, I went to open it. Ivan and Leonid were on the threshold. To say that we were glad to see them is like saying nothing. During the war, without news, both returned alive and well!

We all literally escaped from the captivity of the disease at the same time. A brother and sister jumped out of bed, fussed, hung up soldiers’ overcoats, and began to set the table. There was not even a need for words – a smile did not leave the faces of the whole family. Even Sasha perked up, dangling his legs off the bed, smiling mysteriously, examining our defenders.

From the stories of Ivan and Leonid, we finally learned their whole life in recent months. It turned out that they were not accepted for service at the district military enlistment office because of their age, then they spontaneously decided to go to the front, at least as paramedics. Then there were a month and a half of training in the field, dangerous service in the frontline zone, rescue of the wounded. And now, their numerous petitions have been granted and after a three-day vacation they will return to their unit as ordinary Red Army soldiers.

– Are you only for three days?  Masha asked with regret.

– It’s going to be a wonderful eternity for us! – Ivan smiled in response, – Let’s set the table already.

The guys brought sugar, nuts, dried fruits, canned fish – incredible delicacies for that time! And all we had was a few slices of bread and boiling water, so there wasn’t much to set the table.

• No, that won’t do, – Ivan said, inspecting our feast.

– Let’s go to the market and buy something, – Leonid suggested, getting up from the table.

– Can I come with you?  I jumped up after the brothers.

They both granted my request with an affirmative nod of their heads and, quickly gathering myself, I ran after them.

In those days, spontaneous markets could arise and disappear for several days almost anywhere, in squares, streets, even courtyards. The authorities tried to disperse these gatherings, so the merchants did not stay in the same place for a long time. Moreover, these markets had a bad reputation. At the other end of the district, my brothers and I came across one of these markets. Contrary to expectations, it was an incredibly lively place filled with all kinds of goods from groceries to antiques, so we even got a little lost in this abundance.

– Soldiers, do you want to buy something? – some merchant grabbed Ivan by the sleeve.

We turned towards the counter. Behind him stood a short old man, whom I disliked at first sight. He had small, angry, depressed piggy eyes, a bumpy robber’s face, and he was dressed in a padded jacket and a black earflap.

– Yes, Father, we should have something for the table… – Ivan began.

– Maybe meat?  That terrible grandfather interrupted him.

– Do you have any meat? – We were surprised.

– Yes, but be quiet… – he looked around and took out a small bundle soaked in blood, – Pork, fresh!

– And where does it come from?  Leonid hesitated, carefully examining the goods. I immediately remembered the neighbor’s story, but the evil look of this man scared me so much that I did not dare to tell about it now and hoped that there was pork in the bag.

– This is for the elite, but I got it on occasion, – he said, as if justifying himself.

– What’s the difference, we can’t find it cheaper and better. We’ll take it!  Ivan said decisively.

As I was leaving, I took another look at that grandfather and he answered me with his cold gaze, so I quickly looked away and tried to forget myself in conversations with my brothers.

Soon we were at home and joyfully handed Masha the package we had bought. She jumped up with joy and ran to the kitchen to cook. But before we could sit down at the table, Masha thoughtfully returned back to the room and spoke softly:

– Guys, there’s something wrong with the meat…

– What happened?  Leonid came up to her.

For a minute he silently examined this small piece, lightly tracing it with his finger, then suddenly changed his face and cried out:

– Yes, it’s human!

– You’re lying!  Ivan snatched the meat from his hands.

– Look for yourself!  Leonid waved it off.

There was a tense pause, after which Ivan sullenly agreed:

– You’re right.…

Without saying another word, he quickly went to the window, opened it and angrily threw the meat out into the street. So we were left without a festive dinner.

Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings

Examine a close reading of the poem “Whitsun Weddings” with critical analysis and textual references.

(Image of Philip Larkin, a black and white photo of a skinny middle-aged white man sitting on a couch in a room, wearing reading glasses).

Whitsun Weddings is a brandishing testamentary swashbuckler locomotive wedding party of ceremonial festivities and ritualistic observance of postcolonial and post industrial England. The impending wedding coach has been metaphorically epitomized by Philip Larkin as a means of celebratory cavalcade. “We headed towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building plots and poplars cast”

Whitsun Weddings occasion symbolically manifest old maidish Postcolonial British folks entrenched and rooted by a connubial affair in accord to the fiscal reformation aftermath of the beginning of a new financial year instead of that ending from a previous year. Philip Larkin’s vaticination and sortilege of the porters and mails bears to metaphorical connotations of pregnant women and their spouses respectively through avant garde impressionism. Poet laureate’s setting and locale of Whitsun Weddings is a treasure trove of observation, reflection and contemplation amidst “Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.”

“The secret like a happy funeral” encapsulates the oxymoronic ambivalence that is at the heart of this fascinating reading of Larkin’s litany poems. “While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared. At a religious wounding” might implicate references to saturnine temperaments and stony faced solemnity being exposed to sepulchral sombre melancholia. The affair of espousal is overall sultry dismay, gloomy despair, desultory grim and grave depression in accord with Larkin’s point of view. Expanses and vistas of England with drifting of Britannic legacy and British isles have been subjected to dismantlement and shrinkages afterwards of the Great World Wars. 

Whitsun Weddings is that seventh Sunday after Easter, Pentecost Christian holiday, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and disciples of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem and 1950s Britain’s progressive levy reform position legitimizes financially beneficiary matrimonial alliance. The signature litany of verbal photographic memorabilia from the memorialization of a train travelling outside the carriage windows rattling through the British landscapes. Englishness and Britishness of the 1960s era symbolize cultural hallmarks of the charismatic poem as indicated by the parodies of fashion lurking beneath veils and heels of soon to be wedded maidens and already betrothed ladies. Language, speech, prosody and rhetoric has been alchemically metamorphosed from the bedrock of ordinariness to that extraordinary visual and auditory impact and emphases. For exemplary evidences point to uncles with smutty mouth, fathers with broad belts under suits and mothers with seamy foreheads, nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes and lemons, mauves and olive ochres.  

“A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain” herein the epilogue revealing epiphanic heavenly downpour onto earth as metaphorical connotations of anarchy being poured. Larkin, haunted and obsessed with marriage, conspicuously extrapolates the unforeseen on edge and fidgety ending. 

BBC has a radio show where Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin’s poem The Whitsun Weddings.

Pain is a cloud cut by a blade

My throat is learning to choke again

No one will be able to love you the same way before

No one can die like you did

I give you castles in the air

I give you sand castles

I’m drowning in the rising tide

I’m drowning in time and death

Pain is a cloud shot in/from minutes

The sand covers the past and 

I am drowning in the depths of the sands

***

Mom taught the soldier to read

Mom taught the soldier how to dress

The soldier did not teach his mother to cry

The soldier did not teach his mother to wait

You can’t be born mothers

You can die mothers

Corpses dig trenches for themselves

Corpses are dug out from trenches

***

The tree is dead

Nobody organized a funeral

No one came to say goodbye to the deceased

No one has made a coffin out of human skin

The tree was killed in an unequal battle with a chainsaw

The tree was killed by depriving the executioner of excess oxygen

Trees are so humble that they will endure anything

Trees are so proud that they even die in silence

***

Crystal air

Crystal man

Crystal leaves under crystal feet

Mines

***

1

snowflake cures snowflake

time does not stand still 

and the snow molds jugs of touches

2

the bird drinks the morning silence

spring grass is washed with morning dew

the cemetery in the morning is unchanged

3

Inevitable night plays snowballs

another moment and the eyelids will drop

forever

***

аliens are looking 

for the last flower 

in the history of planet 

***

the grass falls asleep

autumn rain drinks 

the growing silence

***

the leaves under my feet 

taught my bones to crunch 

again

***

birds seek sound 

and proud friendship 

in feathered dandelions

***

nobody knows 

who’s hiding under 

the killing snow

***

Feet are washed with water and eyes are dried

The desert of the gaze envelops with heat

Look at me and tell me that no one will die

The glass fades and the mosaic breaks into pieces

Bread crumbs gradually become smaller

Birds quietly peck bread or eyes

The world stands still waiting for the future

A storm of inaction envelops the tree

The tree does not resist but dies

How many crosses can a tree give birth to?

How many crosses can a cleaver make?

The grains of time keep their own count

***

You are silent

I drink the silence

You are a bird

I am a torn feather

You give me joy

I’m not happy about anyone or anything

You kiss me with your lips of sunny pearls

I’m still dying slowly

***

Someone is counting the number of stars in the sky

Nobody knows how many suns died in a sore chest

We all smoke the air of freedom and we all die

But what will the homeless angels think of us?

***

the sky under my feet turned into puddles

a little boy with a strange name comes to me every night

he asks to copy an icon from him

and I can draw little things in my dreams

the painted sky under my feet dissolves with the sound of the alarm clock

***

the garage stinks of gasoline

the radio in the kitchen is annoying during dinner

and the younger brother shudders at the sight of the leather belt as before

even after our father’s death

***

ran away from math class

autumn started a lesson with origami

but 

sorry I’m too lazy

sorry I’m too sad

for this lesson

silence flows through the veins of the air

the cuts on my hands are almost healed

the rope loop on the chandelier still hangs in my room

I still doubt that everything will go according to plan

I’ll probably skip English lesson tomorrow

I have important things to do in my room

***

lips crack without waiting for a kiss

the snow sculpting the touching 

at the bus stop

***
bones entwined
with flowers
wash the coffin
with their
whiteness
like its a dirty box
with a surprise

***
a black cat falls from the roof
into the night mouth of silence

***
sort through cards with the names of the dead
do not sort through cards with the names of the dead
the death assistant has a lot of busyness

***
white people with a clear (empty?) conscience enter my house
black birds on the windowsill knock on the iron night of death
white people beat
fear out of their heads
black birds sew up their eyes
with despair

***
the rubber hunger of poverty
blood flows like a spring
glossy eye drinks
sugar stream does not quench your thirst

***
Syncopation caught the top of the mountains, so air screamed and drowned in the river.
Surprisingly, the fiery heart descended from the sky and also sank in the water. We have
been living without the sun for a month.
What else does the river water carry away in memory and wash away on the eve of the end
of the world?