The Poetry Of.
Harold Lorin.................................................................
Wildebeast
With no mad dreams the Wildebeast
Breathes, as we do, death and fear
Beneath an empty unrepenting sky.
With no mad dreams the Wildebeast
Breeds its children far beneath
A mindless unrelenting sky.
With no mad dreams the Wildebeast
Endures, as we do, drought and pain
Beneath an unrepenting unrelenting sky.
Brave is the Wildebeast who lives
Without the words of comfort or of hope.
With no imagined promises from Angels or from God.
After
I dream the poem of were you to die,
to leave me untended by the slope of your
shoulder and your sauteed mushrooms,
and your odd views of how to sail
The Beagle.
That poem, as all, meant
for your eyes, not finding your eyes,
would wander with me out to our path to the forest
listening for a sign
that you had heard, that you
approved, that you knew we would again someday
be together in the garden, when I am
a poet and you love me.
PRAYER OF THE DEAD
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo
We are, at the end, outside of what was ours.
The children whisper 'comatose or moribund',
And taking custody, worry about taxes,
And wonder (there is reason for concern)
If the Matisse is real.
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo
The dying Jew knows God does not love him.
This God is his own Sin, for which Christ died,
More awesome than the childish sins of which we are accused.
More than the Matisse may not be real.
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo
My father, as his father, died in pain
While I was whispering in the hall inheriting
The sins, the genes, the properties that bring me here.
As well as the Matisse which my wife thinks real.
Yishgadaj. Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo.
The Miracles of Science fail as did the Miracles of Faith.
The healing chemistries augment the death in me,
Like prayer, like benediction, they are artifice
The day is long and all are on the cross.
It may be only the Matisse is real.
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo.
Long ago Prometheus loved us and
Knew we had had a bad arrangement from the start.
We bear it only by affecting penitence.
We bear it only by pretending to be guilty.
We bear it only by conceiving the Matisse.
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo
In the Matisse the naked kourotrophi dance
Encircled over earth in air
Unsoiled by human prayer or pain,
Unblackened by the ashes of Mt. Sinai
Undarkened by the shadow of the Cross.
Yishgadal, Vyishgadesh, shmay rabo
Invented God, How have we offended thee?
In our frailties and fears, in the uncertain seasons,
In the unsteady rains, in the inconstant winds,
In the thundering and crumbling of mountains,
In the inconstancy of both your love and ours,
In the ambiguities of our hopes and your intentions,
What fruit have we not borne for thee?
Tonight you know
I will know some things I did not know this morning.
Tomorrow, they will know, in any case
If the Matisse is real.
