Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Richard Michelson: Three Poems
Prayer
Today, I am weary of my soul, forever dragging behind me,
clanging for attention like tin cans left tied to a coupe fender
long after the sacred vows. Just now another Black motorist
murdered live on YouTube (shared, copied, spread virally),
tomorrow an Asian, Tuesday a Jew; O friends, transgender,
and cis, what imagination would lash raw ankles to exhaust-
pipes, turn the key and hit the gas? In Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox,
he’s mixed bits of lampblack into the ochre and burnt umber;
and on my Louvre lune de miel, I observed once more a desire
to make the grotesque beautiful. Are we here to be God’s body,
or God’s language? O composers, in what key do we set cruelty?
O poets, what rhymes with the rape of a child? While wildfires
out west melt flesh and southern hurricanes scream the word
mercy, shall we pray by the side of this road my love; my Lord?
~
On Viewing the Cardboard Pig with the Star of David
at the Defund the Police/Black Lives Matter Rally
Looking around the demonstration, surrounded by older White
liberals like myself chanting Black Lives Matter after the murder
of George Floyd, I realize today is the date of my father’s murder
more than forty years ago, not by knee or knife, but the hot White
fury of a single bullet from a stolen gun. The drug-addicted Black
man–really still a boy– can barely steady himself to run. My father,
the last Jewish shopkeeper in a once Black, newly Latino neighbor-
hood long abandoned by police—let them all kill each other; Black,
or Brown– who gives a shit— would not recognize himself as White
or comprehend privilege. Pig—Dog, names my dehumanized father’s
father stitched into the yellow stars of the ghetto’s dirty-Jew squalor
so his son’s son—me—might someday earn my all-American White-
collar legal credentials. Instead, I grew up idolizing Baraka’s Black
Arts Movement, Baldwin’s Blues, cheering the arm-in-arm colors
marching behind Rev King and Reb Heschel as Bull Connor orders
his cops to attack with dogs and guns and clubs. Too soon, Baraka
blaming Jews for 9-11, each club admitting only its own, while White
supremacists arm themselves, waiting. Be neither saint nor martyr
I beg my son, another virus-masked New Yorker, while my daughter
occupies the corner of Gentrification & Squalor, her transgender-Black
allies demanding unconditional love. O, America with your White-
washed past, five-pointed stars, and stiff-backed pigs led to slaughter,
how can I remember the names of the dead? Look, there’s my father.
Today I am Floyd, he prays. Barukh ata Adonai. Today I am Black.
~
Victim Mentality
I’m writing about Hitler’s Aunt Johanna who, visiting
her sister’s house to greet her newborn nephew, offers
to watch baby Adolph while Klara gets a necessary rest
after a welcome but difficult delivery; when my mother,
wiping away tears, interrupts. She’s searching for tissues
as she tells me why she wishes that the little Negro girl—
the one she reads to as part of the senior-center program
to aid the disadvantaged–had picked a different picture
book; the Pinkney-Lester one was about slavery and why
let that delicious child grow-up with a victim’s mentality?
After all, haven’t we had an African-American president,
and did you ever hear talk of the Holocaust in our house?
That’s why you turned out happy, she continues, and well-
adjusted, although God knows, even you have your issues.
Copyright 2023 Richard Michelson. From Sleeping as Fast as I Can by Richard Michelson (Slant Books, 2023).
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow!
LikeLike
Exactly.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reading these three poignant poems, I kept thinking of Rilke’s first lines of the First Elegy: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” Such cries, those poems!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, these poems resonate for me: the cry of an anguished soul at war with itself.
>
LikeLike