Robert Knox Verse-Virtual 2018 July

July 2018

Bionote: I am a Boston area writer (poetry, fiction, journalism). My chapbook "Cocktails in the Wild" was published this spring by Unsolicited Press. My short story "Hour of the Moth: The Candidates" is currently up on the website of the literary mag Duende at http://www.duendeliterary.org/robert-knox. Poems this month reflect on the theme of "America," one of my favorite subjects. The "Elegy" borrows from Shelley's famous elegy for Keats, "Adonais." The prophetic tone of these two poems borrows widely from almost everywhere, including the Bible.

Elegy for America (1776-2016)

I weep for America -- she is dead!
Oh, weep for Liberty, though our tears spare
Not a single border corpse whose life is fled
Nor restore a child stripped from a mother's care
Nor raise a safe house anywhere
For the stranger who comes among us
Seeking what no longer flourishes in a land
Of souls blinded to the light her torch once cast
For those who from dejection rise to make a stand

Oh cry for America, she has fled
To the places only humble people know
To the basement squats and wastelands where the walking dead
Prey on hope with hearts of ice and vicious blows
That from death's viceroy in the Tower flow
Infection deep corrupts the flesh and stains the mind
Of ideals born of Adams, Lincoln and of King
Who dreamed a city of a higher kind
That now lies dying from an adder's self-inflicted sting

ii.
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when she lay?
The ceremonies of innocence
are drowned in the waters of Remembrance
among the floating corpses
at the Borders of National Disgrace

By the waters of Forgetfulness
We throw down our hearts
and cry for the ceaseless murders, both of body and of mind,
sanctified, ritualized, by our uniformed betrayers

We cry for you, America
For the Union dead, and for the Confederate dead,
For the Marines landing at high tide on Pacific Island
For the Nisei dying on the slopes of Fascist redoubts
For the continent's First Peoples routed
            from the tents of Standing Rock
By order of the nation's betrayers,
the storm troopers employed by You,
            Our Mutilated America,
Who, spectral weak and zombie-pure, feeds on schoolhouse dead

We cry for you
For the border corpses,
For the gassed and bombed families in impoverished Yemen,
dead with the dirty fingerprints of our Military Assistance,
born of Our Studied Indifference to the innocent victims
of Incorrectly Targeted Assassinations

For the souls of the Gun Lobby Massacres
Victims we lay at the feet of the Idolaters of the Ancient Laws
Cross-referenced to the Monument of the Lynching Victims

For the bloody flags dipped in Flint's poisoned water
For the Sacrifice of impoverished sons and daughters
to the greed of our current Era of Gilded Neglect
We cry for the love we bear for
the flags, and temples, and sacred documents, and pledges of allegiance
offered to the Flame of Hope and the Alliances of Love
that flicker, barely, still


You. Me. RFK.

Fifty years ago,
not much time in the fossil record
(by contemporary measure we're all fossils now)
but a considerable bite in a lifespan
No phones, no careers, no parents to speak of
No job beyond short-term janitoring in college dormitories
Viewed in the antique light of old snapshots, recollected in selfish nostalgia
like something once seen in a movie
Days bumbling from pot party for lunch
to adolescent sulk over some fresh tease
What did anybody ever see in that early attempt at me?

And even when it was just us, unable to care about anything happening
in that America, where no one had yet managed
to apologize for the Vietnam War (still waiting)
Waking for the custodial morning sideshow
in the adolescent island-continent of self-absorption,
the radio nags us about the Kennedy killing --
What? That again?
Then a slow second waking to the realization that the "faceless men"
have struck again out of their crazed humiliation and need,
or a cruel fate's mere apocalyptic joy over seeing
what wounded hearts might make of another disaster
so soon after the Walpurgisnacht following the public lynching
of the nation's first secular saint since Lincoln.

Ungovernable America!
The signature failure of the species' contemporary experiment
in self-control, group management by the self-rule -- popular sovereignty
we called it once --
to the marked (and grievously unmarked) detriment to the planet,
to which we are only now awakening.
America, the leading edge of the experiment
to show that radical individualism was compatible with a moral code --
any moral code -- but revealed instead that radical self-interest,
the me-first amorality that governs us still,
is the only wholly reliable natural product
of Natural Right philosophy, liberated technology, and the marvelous inventiveness
of Money.

Each hominid (of either gender) may now by right kill their home invader
with their unprimed musket,
providing they are willing to banish into outer darkness
all who disagree;
and conspire to confer the crown of leadership
on a vain and childish ape of meager understanding
rather than face truths of their own dire condition.

Yet 'Bobby,' the brand of a martyred savior of a half-century ago,
is a name for children (believe me, I know)
that males outgrow
in the self-absorbed sandbox of maturity we call the 'ego.'
And while RFK, feeling our pain -- even that inclusive pain
born of the centuries-long domination by soul-sick masters --
might have spared us the evil farce of accelerating massacres
by the small-souled villain empowered by the self-governing masses,
and whom American amnesia later stamped -- in the grip of moral oblivion --
as if the Romans had coined collector memorials to Caligula....

Yet 'Bobby' in forty-two years of personal growth
was but a recent convert to empathic humanity,
as James Baldwin recounts, when the AG was petitioned to stand
with the spat-upon children seeking to enter Southland's segregated schools,
but demurred for reason of practical politics.

I too (have not we all?) dreamed better futures for "our" America:
counter-culture America, mystical pre-millennial America,
digitally remastered millennial America:
the America of my children,
and of all our flesh and blood countrymen who have found the heart
to love others,
and to resist the temptation simply to retreat into
the Fallout Shelter of Terminal Me-ism
and pull the time-lapsed photo-shopped poster of the Death of the Living World
upon the trap door that covers our heads,
and blocks out the screams;

...and so dwell in the old movies and faded photographs of a life that we,
and the many, have oft-times loved
in the knowledge that hearts that feel
what we have felt
and therefore may yet constitute a justification for our continued mastery
of the Earth,
in the hope that we may all someday become incarnations of the Buddha of Compassion

But that greater love
that no homo sapiens seems to acquire,
may demand some greater sacrifice
for the sustenance of all that we must also love --
the green and blue space-ball of the Miracle Entire --
grown long in the tooth while we hominids have
eaten out its heart,
nibbled its toes, consumed its flesh, and now work our way
through to its rich inner organs...

may now, that is, decree
our time has come
to drink the hemlock.

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