Ahmadinejad Ate Their Votes!

Alteration of Photo I took as the plane approached Houston, on my flight to the east coast

Original: http://www.fotolog.com/richnature/39449575

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In honor of an important local writer and teacher, Morton Marcus, who recently passed away, I am continuing to share some of his writings:

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Poems by Morton Marcus:

MY DAUGHTERS GROWN

1.
I have returned numberless times
to that room where my daughters slept
when they were seven and two
and I heard the slender wings
of their breathing climb
and hover above their heads,
a slow flexing in that house
they haven't lived in for twenty years.

It is a father's journey undertaken
again and again to watch over and protect
in the night, while the wind
roars outside and the stars'
blue fires burn like sapphires
around that house of memory.

2.
Grown now, both live lost and alone
in the small high rooms of tall buildings
in separate cities far away, and each night
I lumber toward those cities
but get no farther than that room
they slept in so long ago. Exhausted,
I loosen the straps of my knapsack
and set it aside like another body
at their bedsides, watching them
as they were when I wished
what a father does for his daughters,
a jumble of longings I could never
put into words and knew even then
were impossible.

So is it any wonder
that I cannot tell them by phone
what I wish for them, or at least
say something that will ease
the hurt and confusion in their words,
as sirens and horns and random shouts
enter the windows behind them
and wrestle with their voices
over the wire?

3.
My wife,
who has similar problems with her father,
says I always imagine my daughters
as little girls asleep in that ancient room,
and only when I portray them as women
will we be able to converse in a manner
that will satisfy us all. She' s right,
I'm sure, but she's not a father.

Last night I visited that room again,
but it rolled and pitched, the house
no longer a house but a ship plunging
through the night, transporting
a cargo of children all in my care
to an unknown destination. I stood
on the deck, knowing there was
no wheelhouse behind me and no rudder,
and all I could do was pray for them all,
while, like a celestial liner,
the ship slid through the night,
its hull scraped and scarred
by the hot sapphire of the stars.

Poems from
The Armies Encamped In The Fields Beyond The Unfinished Avenues

AUTUMN

Each of us lives in a secret gorge. We think that autumn will make us young again, and this is important because it provides us with a season we can look forward to, one that will follow summer's boredom.

And autumn arrives, like a faded woman who thinks she is still young, and we know our mistake. But there is an end to our confusion. We return to the city, and in the shadows of the tall buildings and their tattered banners, we point to the woman and say, "There is the one who must be interred. It is for her burial that evening has come."

We ignore her cries when the troops carry her away. We follow them to the edge of the frost, and arrive not as moment too soon.

There in the grave, each of us recognizes a gorge he had thought was secret.


TOURISTS for Joe Stroud
[Note, another local poet http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/poets/joseph.stroud.htm ]

In this land everything is poor. The people have pressed their backs into postures of humility and climb from crevices to beg for food.

We offered them coins, which they immediately ate, unaware of their teeth breaking. We offered them our scarves and hats, then our key chains, staring as they devoured each one.

Finally, we broke off slabs of rock, which some of them ate, while others began nibbling our pant legs or running their wet tongues along the sleeves of our jackets.

We fed them our words, whole sentences, paragraphs, but still they kept eating. And when we turned, we found they had devoured our car, which lay on its side like the skeleton of a cow.

It was after they ate our clothes that the slimmer of us were able to escape: we ran naked among them and began wrenching up roots and desperately chewing.

Later we remembered that our passports had been in our pockets, and the guards at the border have refused us permission to pass.

Now we squat at the edge of the snow, waiting for tourists. But when they arrive, they only throw coins. We want to tell them who we are, and when no one is looking we attempt to grab their hands, which they hurriedly withdraw.

We have not lost hope, but we grow hungrier every day, and each of us has admitted than he can detect the odor of tourists for hours before they arrive.

from http://www.mortonmarcus.com

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