“Worrywart”
first use
1936
fits my sister
born 1939
the year
the war begins.

I am conceived
the night
Churchill enters FDR’s
White House.

My birth year
we are
winning the war.
Dad bursts into
“O What a
Beautiful Morning!”
out that year
1943.

After the war
on the beach
enormous
dirigible looms
as Alice runs
to shield me.

After war
we look at
moon:
“A hundred
miles away”
I say;
“More”
she says.
I am four.

After war
our cousin returns
from Battle of
the Bulge.

Twenty-three
he pins me
to the floor.
I am five.
He says,
“Now I’m
going to take
off your shirt...”
No, I say
and perhaps
he obeyed
as I recall.

Elementary school
chorus sings
in something
thrilling I never
heard live:
two-part harmony:
“Walk on
walk on
with hope...”
two
sides
of
my
brain
open
knit.

At Baldwin School
Bryn Mawr
Victorian castle
by Frank Furness
greatest Philadelphia
architect starchitect

before Louis Kahn
whom Alice
when at Penn
will adore
from afar
and who will die
alone in that
horror new
New York
Penn Station

but his Four
Freedoms Park
for FDR
sails ever to
Eleanor’s UN.

In 1957
at Baldwin
Alice writes
two papers

about

author of
All Quiet on
the Western Front

about

that land of
Bamiyan Buddhas
graveyard of empires.

Those papers
disappear
as alas does
also Alice
1939 to 1987
so I write this poem
with their titles
“Afghanistan” and
“The Effects of War
on Men”
oh prescient
precious Alice.

Alice calls it
draft dodging
but when I say
I am resisting
she sees a little.

DR. KING
full-page
tabloid headline.
Democrat I
Republican she
telegram LBJ
to honor King
with Vietnam
ceasefire.

A little tipsy
she says she
loves me very
very much.
Vectoring her
toward “meeting
people” as she wants
and soon will
I alas reply
“That is a
cross I bear.”
She rises to
weep in the
ladies room.
I shock
myself covered
in shame.

Alice alas
keeps smoking
when all about
are losing theirs
cigarets as I
life as Dad
then she.

Skinny black
homeless man
weaves through
subway car singing
“When you
walk through
a storm”
reducing us
travelers
to tears.

Carter’s
Kissinger
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
makes Soviets
pay for Poland
by giving them
their own
Vietnam
with
Afghanistan.

US
Mujahideen
overthrow Soviets’
Najibullah
Afghans’
only good
president so far.

Mujahideen
torture
castrate
kill
Najibullah.

Mujahideen
become
Taliban
&
Soviets’
Vietnam
becomes
US
Vietnam
or do I mean
US
Afghanistan?

Tom Savage
poet Buddhist
goes there
in the sixties
&
in the new
millennium
in the East
Village writes
a great poem
which begins
“We are
or were
the Bamiyan
Buddhas...”
(2001: Taliban
blow them up,
dust in the winds)

Pondering
power equations of
China & Japan
I have a hunch,
sister Alice.

I go to world
wide web
for exact
measurements of
surface areas of
China
Earth
Japan
moon.

I’m right!
China and Japan!
Earth and moon!
Area ratios
are the same!

Twenty-five to one:
China and Japan.
Twenty-five to one:
Earth and moon!

Oh China!
Oh Japan!
Oh Alice!
Oh moon!
Oh Earth!

Why should I
write a little
song
oh my dear
epic begun
three million
years ago
with our
First Mother
in Africa

Norman MacAfee‘s books include One Class: Selected Poems; The Death of the Forest, opera libretto to music of Charles Ives; and The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now, about Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. MacAfee’s translations include Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems, made with Luciano Martinengo; Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and two volumes of the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life and Quiet Moments in a War, all three translated with Lee Fahnestock. Martinengo and MacAfee have recently completed a collection of their translations of the poetry of Piera Oppezzo (1934-2009), To Set to Music with Laughter the Menace. “Afghanistan and the Effects of War on Men” and “The Mortal Flame” [zine246] are part of a new manuscript of poems, The Mortal Flame.
/
Originally published in 2017 in Journal of Poetics Research (ed. John Tranter).
/
www.alligatorzine.be | © alligator 2024