April 2019
Marc Alan Di Martino
marcdimartino@gmail.com
marcdimartino@gmail.com
Note: I've found it - as you [FF] must have anticipated - difficult to choose one poem I'd even mockingly refer to as my "best". When I begin looking at the poems in that light, all I could see were their faults. I've also always ducked superlatives - they are too easily disproven in matters of taste. But I decided to rise to the challenge, as it were, and I've chosen the poem "Still Life with City."
This poem was written in a Chinese restaurant on 48th St. and 6th Ave. during the week of September 11, 2001. I was working around the corner at the Gotham Book Mart at the time, on my lunch break and finding it hard to concentrate on my hot and sour soup. Fear was in the air, as anyone who was in New York then will surely remember. The poem rolled out in what seemed like automatic writing; I was attempting to frame what was happening around me and make sense of it. I was probably thinking of Auden's "September 1,1939", and the poem ended up having an Audenesque feel to it. Significantly, it was the first poem I ever wrote that felt like a real poem, where I wasn't merely aping the poets I read but was building on their work and adding something of my own. I've been submitting this poem for eighteen years, and it has never been accepted.
This poem was written in a Chinese restaurant on 48th St. and 6th Ave. during the week of September 11, 2001. I was working around the corner at the Gotham Book Mart at the time, on my lunch break and finding it hard to concentrate on my hot and sour soup. Fear was in the air, as anyone who was in New York then will surely remember. The poem rolled out in what seemed like automatic writing; I was attempting to frame what was happening around me and make sense of it. I was probably thinking of Auden's "September 1,1939", and the poem ended up having an Audenesque feel to it. Significantly, it was the first poem I ever wrote that felt like a real poem, where I wasn't merely aping the poets I read but was building on their work and adding something of my own. I've been submitting this poem for eighteen years, and it has never been accepted.
Still Life with City
Our terrible future has just arrived.
The telephone now rings ominously
as we falter, scanning briefly a sky
of asphalt gray, frightened what we seek.
The air outside seems somehow to have died
as claustrophobic clouds conceal the week.
Accusingly our fingers indicate
who is responsible, who is to blame.
Decisions become actions: a face, name,
age or town of birth will at first suffice
to take the place of what some have called ‘fate.’
Comfortable with facts, though, we comprise
a list of enemies, a fraternity
of evil, where oppressor meets oppressed
in a rhetoric of shadows. Unrest
claims us with numbers, trivial asides
we rehearse in our sleep—a parody
of what plagues us, of what tomorrow hides.
Fear is a language we begin to speak.
Murmurs of the uncountable dead fall
mutely on our ears; our thought has moral
consequences it never had before.
Our actions aren’t meaningless, but seek
a love greater than typical ardour.
As time distils in us the daily dread
preoccupations and a need to know
beleaguer us with headlines that grow
darker, still, as we begin to view them
as normal. Our eyesight adjusts, we read
not knowing how or where to place the blame.
It is our impotence that we detest,
powerlessness to function normally
in a familiar environment. We
suffer on the most casual of terms
still finding time to enjoy life, subsist,
root for our team. All evidence affirms
the notion that simply to live is best.
Beyond our guilt exists no common mind
beneath the surface; yet, as one may find,
we’re free to choose a new way of life,
free to accept our anger, or to rest
assured that whatever happens, we survive.
© 2019 Marc Alan Di Martino
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF