Iris
Not how you would be thought of, your color
Being grey, silky, like a second skin, your hair
Flecked with it. Now, hearing your way of saying
Iridescent while I read your poem, three years
After your death, I am compelled to check
You out in Ovid, Lamprière, Bulfin, then
A book of flowers, where I discover you
On marshy ground, not grey exactly—in fact
A pretty blue-grey, a quiet type, with a green cowl
To shelter the thoughtful inclined head.
Not at all the bright-winged messenger
Who’d drown the world if Juno put you up to it,
But a quiet sylph, who could color her message
With a sly tilt of the head, those grey eyes steady,
Lips pursed, making a pretence of kissing.
You could supply so many ambiguities—
Gradations and streaks and tones of grey and blue—
That for twenty years I saw your story told
Where the sky lay on the wintry hills, weighed down
With tears Mnemosyne allows for you:
Flower, messenger, poet.
Meanwhile, In Another Part Of The War
On the street of the concrete refugee tenements
That have collapsed into the smoking holes
The Israeli rockets blew open at dawn’s early light,
The sundered limbs and torsos of a Jenin family
Lie with the shards and dust of their household,
Three generations, shredded like paper dolls.
There are no heads to be found. They never had heads.
If they had heads, the Israeli spokesman assures
The State Department, the U.N., the Believers,
The CNN camera, with his shy smile, in
His Noo Yock twang, they wouldn’t have been
Where the terrorists were.
“Of the three-month-old infant,
Crushed in its cradle, and the eighty-year-old
Shepherd who retired twenty years ago when Israelis
From Russia drove off his flock at gunpoint,
And his son’s wife, and the schoolboy, all buried
In the holes the rockets made, which ones
Were the terrorists?” A voice off-camera asks.
But the spokesman shrugs and smiles
Shyly. The cameras and the microphones
Are already turned off.
There were survivors. One, some say
The mother of two victims, has volunteered
To take the bus to Jerusalem.
A Poem in Place of a Lecture
Or Vice-Versa
This morning, friends, the blackboard will be black
Behind my skull: your eyelids will be slack,
And I could wearily cajole from you, or you,
Slow answers to dull questions; or grow annoyed
Earnestly deploying on the black void
Lyra’s measured stars. But I must learn anew
To cope with darkness: these voids won’t do
As palps where I could plot the dusty lore,
The diagrams, the arty emblems you ignore,
Your blood too thin to tick into the brain
The winged horse mustered from the sod
To be the Muses’ pet, a demi-god
High in black heaven. I will not strain—
The chalk crumpling, your eyelids flickering—to explain
Why ignorant men pricked darkness full of scars
And gave them godly names, and called them stars.
You quench whole constellations on the black
Walls of your skulls; arts you dishonour die.
The sky will go black and Hippocrene run dry
Before I will fix one light in your blind skulls this black
Morning, friends. The blackboard will stay black.
