Throne

By Christopher Bernard

“Queen Elizabeth II: Britain’s longest reigning monarch dies aged 96”

“World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds”

—Two headlines from September 8, 2022

The rock you rolled to the top of the tender hill, 
The ship you winged into the regal bay, 
The sun you alchemied in a whispering still,
The heel you drove into stone as into clay, 
The moon in your thimble, meteor in your dream, 
School round your dubious, bloody history 
Curling toward the sun, a scruffy team; 
A knight in darkness fighting faithfully 
The dragon wrapped inside his thrusting mind 
Alarmed, frightened, cunning, clever, strong. 
Out of nothing designed and yet designed 
To trap a cosmos in a wind of wrong 
On a day when fire eats his meat and bread, 
His future closes like a fist, and a queen is dead. 

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

August, New Hope, 1961

By Christopher Bernard

The heavy ripening summer,
green in the mountains,
high wheat, sleek corn,
alfalfa massed against the ground,
strawberries, raspberries, black,
peaches almost over-ripe,
tomatoes big and sweet –
a sultry land baking hot
with loam, topsoil, sleep.

The year ripening:
the wind from the north, in snow, rain,
ice, forgotten. Trickles
of moisture tickle the back of your neck.
Nothing tempts like ice-sweat lemonade,
except maybe a plunge 
in a pool under the hickories.
Time stops for weeks.
You never want it to move again.

August the earth in that place slept
and dreamt of a half-forgotten spring,
winter dead, July’s hopes,
as a whisper of coolness slipped inside,
like a drop of water inside a crack.
And under the sultry atmosphere
a breath of ice stole like a knife, 
steely and rare. . . .
Someone now long dead
looked up from her summer book, hesitated, and said,
to no one in particular, “I can feel fall in the air.”

_____
	
Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

What Is the Opposite of Politics?


A shift of rain in the trees.
A snow globe in a sandbox.
My cousin's scuffed knees.

What is the cost of mercy?
A spade of silent rust.
You'll never know if justice
is less refined than dust.

Who is that fellow singing?
I never knew his kind.
You say he's rough and tender.
I hope to live forever
if heaven is his mind.
_____

Christopher Bernard’s most recent book is A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, winner of a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and named one of the “100 Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is founder and a principal, with Ho Lin, Steven Hill, and Jonah Raskin, of the webzine Caveat Lector.

After

By Christopher Bernard

After all the tweets are done,
and all the posts erased,
and all the insta videos
are drowned in silicon,

and all the newsfeeds freeze 
while panic-scrolling past,
and social media “likes”
are hated – yes! – at last,

and all the influencers
are swallowed  by TikTok,
and every troll is smothered
by every soul they mock,

and every “Facebook friend”
has ghosted all their contacts,
not knowing all their contacts
already ghosted them,

and all the digerati
encrypted and encased are
within a frozen chassis,
a whited sepulchre
where their data asleep forever.

and all the web and net
have smothered all their flies
and fattened like two spiders
till all their pixels died,

and all the household names
have blown to clouds and air,
and drifting smoke and ashes
are all the billionaires

into clouds of musk, 
and hell’s unlocked gates
smother the world’s last jobs
suckered to a mark
and a betraying oracle
and a final dying lark –

you and I, my love, my fair, 
shall hover above their shrines
that no one visits, in
a love that conquers silicon
to a quaint soft-shoe rhythm,
all the screen’s illusions,
and death’s algorithm, 

and there we shall dance
inscribed in these brave lines,
my fairest, sweetest, loveliest one,
till the very end of time.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

Knock Knock:
A Poem for Ukraine

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
I have walked from far,
Over fields of snow
And ice of roads
And cities at war.
I don’t know you.
Are there any with you?
My family is gone,
I don’t know where.
I’m here all alone.
May I come in?
I have a number
On my hand. Can I call?
Not on my land!
There’s a country
Down the road.
Try them there.
It’s far, and I’m cold.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
Can I come in?
I’m so tired,
And the wind is so cold. . . .
Why are you here?
What is that 
In your eyes? Is it tears?
Is it sadness or fear?
No, it is ice,
It is melting there.
Go down the road.
There is nothing for you here.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
Can you say where I am?
I saw ghosts on the road,
They looked like my papa,
My mama, my sister,
My brother at home.
Has anything happened to them?
Will you please let me in?
I’m so tired, I don’t think 
I can walk any more.
I can’t feel my hands.
May I come in here?
What is that number
Written out on your hand?
When I call, there is silence 
At the other end.
Come in and rest
On my bed. No, it’s snow . . .
When you sleep you will never
Fear war again.
No, no, I must go,
How will I get home
If now I don’t go?
Come in and rest,
Come in and rest,
Come in and rest
Until you must go . . .  

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Who knocked at our door?
Show yourself if you’re there!

But there was no one there,
Only the sound of the wind,
And the snow in the air.


The Sunken Palace 

The curlew calls in the sycamore tree.
Do you hear it? A boy’s laugh follows.

A rustle of gold flickers over the lake.
The sky is cold and on fire.

Do you see the fair one, the kind one, the holy?
She is not to be seen on the tower.

There is only a shadow to be seen in the arch
And an iron gate as it closes.

He is gone now, and she is not here.
Their story, our story, is over.

The palace of love was a fable. The rain
Fell for long on the meadow.

At the season when the moon was a song in the snow
And the wind was a shout in the mountains,

The ghosts of the palace where the ballroom had drowned
Danced in a lake of shadows.


The Sound of Falling Trees


“There’s no such thing as ‘being a poet.’” 
—T. S. Eliot

It used to be
an almost embarrassing compliment.
If someone called you that, you skipped 
a heartbeat of secret bliss,
as if the most beautiful girl in class
had just blown you a kiss.
Now it is almost an embarrassment.
“Writers in San Francisco,”
New York and L.A. smile to each other
with a wink and a nudge. “Aren’t they all
poets? They can be safely ignored,
left to PEN and AWP,
unless you go in
for the penniest of penny stocks.
They can’t even make themselves any money,
let alone the likes of you and me;
they’re famous only if they die
(I know it sounds bold, but it’s so true) by
a monumentally gaudy suicide.”

It’s not much of a compliment anymore, yet
it is still a kind of destiny, a kind of fate:
a compulsive need to find new words
for old emotions, old and raw,
and make them ring like bells in the winter air—
clear and true and fading into oblivion—
the crash of trees falling deep in the forest
even when there is no one to hear.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

The Dragons of Paris

(Upon reading Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ 
Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont)

By Christopher Bernard


Once upon a time, 
in the glamorous, notorious City of Lights
that lies across the sinuous Seine
like a seductive odalisque
of reason and sensuality,
beauty, style, good taste, and sense,
there appeared a foul and toxic fog,
a smoke that belched and bound the town
in mental night.
The citizens wandered, stunned and blind
and crying out in random shouts
in words no one could understand:
“Le petit a! Jouissance! Différance!
Pastout! Afemme! Séméiotiké!”
that filled the air all over France
from caves deep down in old Lutéce
(“Mudville,” once called, now called again),
where the Dragons of Paris disbursed, in smog,
dank volumes of mephitic breath.

The Dragons’ names put terror in
the hearts of all good citizens:
Lacan le Gros, Foucault le Mal, 
grinning Baudrillard le Bouffon,
Kristeva la Sorciére,
Jacques Derrida l’Indécidable,
Gilles Deleuze, la Porte Sublime
du Dindon de la Charabia, 
and more, with a host of dragonettes
pursuing the work of their dark masters
cooking in their dens a glorious madness
of chopped dictionaries and tossed 
charlatanry, spiced with cynicism,
that sickened two generations
of impressionable, clueless, half-educated youth,
most of them – hélas! – American.
	
One day two knights rode from the west –
Sir Alan and Sir Jean by name,
“Follow the Science!” writ on one shield,
“Physics to the Rescue!” upon the other –
and bravely stormed the fetid caves
whose floors and walls were lined with texts
with dragon sweat and guano thick,
unreadable, yet cruelly read
by generations of undergrads
and graduate students until they squealed,
“There is no truth, there is no Real,
no good not always already a weapon,
Big Other, subject, sexual relation
(sorry, mom, dad! I never really happened!),
no meaning not infinitely deferred,
no science, objectivity, facts
(“no facts but only interpretations,”
as unholiest St. Fritz of Nietzsche said);
‘Il n’y a rien hors de texte!’; no world,
nothing whatsoever beyond the Word!”
(because, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t get
a degree (in English) so they could teach
in a nice, respectable university, 
and maybe someday get tenure – but then, my friends,
they wouldn’t even get that – poor dears! – in the end).

With a thousand bold strokes, Sir Jean and Sir Alan
pierced the hides of the Parisian dragons
(“Mathematical gaffes! Scientific misunderstanding!
Bad logic, worse grammar, bad French and worse English!
Logical dead ends! Arithmetical nonsense! Hang it, just meaningless gibberish!”)
and out of the holes in those green slippery skins
hot air hissed away in a gale o’er the Seine,
and the dragons – the two Jacques, the one Julie,
Jean, Gilles, Michel, and a crowd of others – 
shrieking death cries, flew about in a panic
as they shrank like a frantic mob of balloons,
gnashing and frothing and hopelessly flying
from darkness to darkness – one felt sorry for them,
almost – till they shriveled down to what they had been
all along: a few inches of thin rubber, with mouths
agape, and nothing whatever inside them but air.

Sir Alan and Sir Jean, armor dented and scarred,
swords flecked with balloons punctured, and smeared with ink,
exited the caverns out to the light
and the acclaim of a grateful city. “At last!”
rose the cry on all sides, “We can again see the sun!
We can breathe! We are freed from the impenetrable night
that threatened to destroy us – above all, our minds!”

The two knights, bloodied, exhausted, but victorious, 
took their modest bows. “You are really too kind!”
Then glanced at each other: it wouldn’t do now
to tell these people they were partly to blame
for nursing the dragons with their own folly:
spare the critic and spoil the intellectual.
Don’t get them in the crib, and give them a fight?
When (if!) they grow up, they’ll give you a bite!

At the banquet that followed, they had stories to tell:
close calls with the enemies of thought and light,
genuine creation, and piety for the human:
intellectual pretentiousness in a shotgun wedding
with despotic professional intimidation
fueled, on the one hand, by status anxiety
and, on the other, by narcissistic delight.

Unhappily, they had not gotten
all the dragons in the end:
one sly dragonette from the Balkans fled,
escaping to Slovenia,
his innocent home, where he remains,
cooking his oracles for the next set
of gullible college students, if there are any left!

_____


"Christopher Bernard’s most recent book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Boks of 2021.” 

#littlebylittle

(A sequel to “How to Save the World: A New Year’s Resolution”)

By Christopher Bernard

1.

“Little by little” was the phrase
for everything she feared to face, to
keep her quiet, calm, unfazed
despite whatever she must do
that otherwise might make her crazed
with the enormity of the true.

2.

Who was she? A heart of life,
loyal, strong, generous,
kind, true, not without strife,
not perfect yet good, for me, for us.
I save and keep her name. Her love
was stronger than life. She taught me love

3.

Little by little, we can do
what we must do. Strangers, friends,
pull back a little here, just so,
a little now. Prevent the end.
Protect the earth from our dark arts.
Preserve the world with your strong heart.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”