Edwin S. Segal Verse-Virtual 2016 July

July 2016

I've been writing poetry since college (late 50s). Fortunately, everything before 1974 has been lost. Since I don't engage in good practices such as setting a time every day to write, I'm often surprised at how much I've accumulated. Some of my published poetry has appeared in Poetica Magazine and Verse-Virtual; a lot is out of print. I'm Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Louisville. Apprentice House Publishing has just agreed to publish, Heritage, my first chapbook.

After the Desert

We marched through the desert heat,
pebbles in the rippling air,
going to a promised place,
growing grapes, grass and lush wheat

We would have water, bread to
eat and a cool tent for rest,
life, living well in comfort
beneath skies of stainless blue.

Living among the others,
tents bloomed, flowers on the sand;
hospitality governed,
and they became our brothers..

But brothers often argue
about issues large and small:
water, soil and boundaries,
and with no chance to renew

our relationship, which fell
to the strains of the living
world of deep valleys, rifts
which promised a salted hell.

We both inhabit this land,
fighting to preserve our ways,
the landscapes of our lives,
for us it’s more than sand.

Plugs in Their Ears

Some have plugs in their ears; some
carry small screens in their hands;
some have nothing to carry.

They seem like abstract human
beings: form, but no substance,
fluttering and twittering,
making noise without understanding.

Ectoplasmic voices speak
of now, then and tomorrow;
we listen with rapt faces.

Speaking to unseen avatars,
we hold forth on all topics,
never learning our own minds,
waiting for their instruction.

So we speak to them of life
and now, with no end in view.
There are always more voices.

And they always come in a
twenty-four second cycle
fluttering around our ears
with mindless ease and we hear

them at all seasons, all times.

Pundits

We are haunted by our future,
rapt up in our false forecasts.
We are not prophets, but insist
on our visions of what will come.
We have ignorant certitude.

Spirits swarm through our pretenses
sitting on our shoulders; speaking
half heard sounds, sibilant whispers,
portents of the unknown to come.
But we say we know what will be.

We pretend to know true and false,
even when our eyes are closed by
our own agendas, and spirits
speak to us through the spells we make
by not knowing what we might know.

We hear the pull of events,
but see none of them and we hear
even less in our life with its new cycle,
filled with tales of sound and fury,
which give our world its wisdom.

And so we continue our
pretense of sagacity,
talking more, ever saying
less as we dither, twitter
and speak to our vanity.

Walls

Bricks and stones, tier upon tier
Keep them out; keep us in.
Walls are old; walls are new;
Walls are all we ever grew.

Long and short, here and there
Build it high; let no one win
Walls are old; walls are new;
Walls are all we ever grew.

Some have cracks; some have holes.
Some climb under; some go over.
Walls are old; walls are new;
Walls are all we ever grew.

Split the land; give them their’s,
Less than ours and with some pain.
Walls are old; walls are new;
Walls are all we ever grew.

Roman walls, Welsh walls,
Chinese walls and the Rio Grande —
Walls are old; walls are new;
Walls are all we ever grew.

Walls Walls Walls Walls —
We all build walls
and
They never work