Recent Poetry, November 2024

To the Trump Voters

For him you voted? You’re a fool.
You’re a Nazi, and you drool.
He plainly said what he would do,
If elected. Naught for you.

A dictatorship we soon will be,
Because you put in power he,
Who knows not how our systems work,
A moral imbecile. A jerk.

Idolatry

I agree with Thomas Merton,
Idolatry’s the greatest sin,
Of this truth we both are certain.
You need no calf of gold to win.

The idolatry of concepts works,
Superior to images in fact,
We bow before them all like jerks
A concept’s so much more compact.

Whether it’s truth or faith or bread,
A concept’s so much easier, ace,
It lives there strictly in the head,
Where it takes up little space.

Julian of Norwich (circa 1343-sometime after 1416)

You were voluntarily enclosed in that church wall,
Of the cathedral in Norwich,
Where you spent the rest of your life,
Not knowing that you’d become,
Deathly ill there,
Or that in that illness,
You’d have a vision of the
Love of Christ,
Permeating the whole Universe,
And that you’d later write about it,
In shorter and longer versions.
(The secret is love).

Little is known of you now,
No one knows your real name,
Few know the Middle English
That you spoke and in which you wrote.
But as an unmarried woman
In Medieval times,  it may
Have been that the life of an anchoress,
Was not extreme,
Maybe it simply made a lot of sense.
(The secret is love).

You saw that all creation,
Beautiful and vast,
And accurately described,
As broad as the universe you knew,
Could also be described as
Something nut-like and hold-able,
In the palm of one’s hand.
(The secret is love).

The ones who understood that,
Would not have to read,
Your two books.
(The secret is love).

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

You considered
The Virgin Spring
To be your worst movie.
I consider it
Possibly your best.
It just goes to show,
That art and artist
Are not necessarily
The same thing.
Maybe that is your
Teaching.