January 2018
Irving Feldman
feldman@buffalo.edu
I retired from the SUNY Buffalo English Department in 2004. Have published a dozen or so collections of poems.  Such my addiction to the sport of squash racquets my headstone is to read: "ONE MORE GAME?"  See more of my poems HERE.​
 
THE GOOD LIFE
 
​
After the dioramas, the Refugees Fleeing
on a Road, the Burn Ward, the Bomb Crater,
and other such vivid scenes of war,
and live families of little Chinks
handing tea things 'round in a sewer pipe
 --- and oh as they stood there in awe at how
the lesser art of art could imitate
the greater art of war, that bulldozing,
those vivisections, oh stood naked almost
in awe before their awe, they felt that day,
one family among many, they felt
the force that surged along their linking hands
strike the dumb resistant wonder and slow
to a simple warm domestic glow:
they were happy to be there together ---
and then the big blow-ups: world leaders
taking it easy at home, looking somehow
like family and sad like your old man
 --- all of it marketing the point about
war is h_ll in sharp, telling images ---
well, when you pressed this certain button,
well, all of a sudden light and sound
started in, everything was all mixed up,
so confused you didn't know who you were
 --- it was like the world was going to blow! ---
noise of armies clashing invaded
their ears, and terrible dark except,
behind red celluloid, rockets madly glared.
They crouched down and closed their eyes and were scared.
 
The light at the end of the tunnel proved
to be the orange roof of a restaurant,
a cockcrow of Early Colonial dawns.
There --- under a mock-up of the Park,
oh it had everything, right down to crowds
of really tiny figures, themselves maybe,
each with a tinier dot of shadow like
a period lying painted at its feet;
it was, you would say, like heaven, seen
from far away, of course, and at the same time
you were in it --- that was funny --- and there
they sat down with other families
to portions of what turned out to be warm
shit.
      Well, then they knew the war was over
and which side won, which didn't much matter,
and bent their heads and said, Thank you, lords,
for taking reality out of our hands
and giving us the good life instead.
  
March 1974
© 2018 Irving Feldman
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