September 2019
My science fiction epic poems led to my being a consultant for NASA. I received Hungary’s highest literary honor for my translations of Hungarian poetry with the distinguished scholar and Holocaust survivor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, won Poetry’s Levinson Prize, and have often been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Born in England, raised in Africa by my anthropologist parents Victor and Edie Turner, and educated at Oxford University, I am a professor of literature, a Shakespearean scholar, an environmental theorist, an authority on the philosophy of Time, poet laureate of traditional Karate, and author of forty books.
The Blackness of the Grackle
The grackle is black as sin, he is like a religion,
he is Satany-satin, slick as the sail of a submarine,
he's a heat-sink, the anodized fin on the cylinder-head.
The grackle collects the light, he collects information,
while about him the cosmos, slovenly, radiates energy.
The grackle recalls the black of earlier absences:
of the night, of the time when no eye recorded the lightfall,
of all other electromagnetic tones on the spectrum;
but he reaches back to bend those more primitive darknesses
to a greater sophistication: to state by not stating;
like the brilliant burn of the black of tropical fishes,
like the sable faces of certain macaques on display,
like the caves of the Ritual Primate, the funeral's raiment,
like subfusc, like Cary Grant's elegant easy tuxedos,
like the gold-crested lacquer scabbards of samurai swords.
The grackle's a black hole, the earpiercing wince of the anvil,
the pure click of an incompressible fluid imploding
and hitting itself as it meets in a clap at its center,
the creak and the splitting of timber, the crack of a timbre,
the berserker's shriek, the rip of heavy silk tearing,
in his strut, his effeminate deadly swagger, his waddle,
his enraged samurai waddle, his overdetermined,
his strenuous Hachiman entrance, the birdgod of warfare,
his lumbering takeoff, a jet fighter-bomber clearing
the runway under the maximum payload of armament;
and in all that blackness—matte-flocked as it would seem to be—
there seems only one thing that is radiant: his gold-milled eye,
like madness, hysteria, overcontrol, hyperthermia,
it's a concave disc to dissipate waste radiation,
the amberbright stare of a warning light showing at midnight;
till all of a sudden the whole point of the metaphor,
what his natural similes meant, is revealed in a flash,
as he spreads his wings and sinkingly measures his glide,
and his back blazes and flows in a wave of iridescence,
as a current discharges, leaving a blob in the eye:
his elegant dress, that requires no pigment to swagger,
but lets its grain fluoresce with waves of diffraction,
like a crowd drilled with cards to form the face of a leader,
like a blind, a burst of X-rays, a gold-trimmed bookedge,
reveals on the earth a sudden parcel of sky.
An Apology for the Poem "The Blackness of the Grackle"
For Frederick Feirstein
Friend, if my verses sometimes seem to praise
What is in nature savage as the fire,
A torment and a trial to our race,
A warning and reproach against desire;
If I have seemed too swiftly to rejoice
Not only in the lamb but in the pyre,
If I have given a finger and a voice
As gladly to the bow as to the lyre;—
Forgive me, for I seek the hidden source,
That dreadful good called beauty, the frontier
From which all other goods and evils take their course;
Or else do not forgive me, though the tare
Is a seed as the wheat is; for the force
That generates them both is hard to bear.
Let Be
Weeding, I disturb a bee
That is bumbling in the sages,
But she has forgiven me,
Goes off to the saxifrages.
There I will just let her be,
And, since bee-ing is her being,
She will go on being free,
She-ing while I go on me-ing.
“Let it be” was how the king
In that strange old myth or story
Gave the bee its sweet and sting,
Set the heavens in their glory:
Was it permit or command?
Do we own, or was he letting,
Are we in or out of hand?
Was he making or just betting?
So he gave himself away,
Changed from he-ing into she-ing,
Where his “shall” became her “may”,
Time born out of unforeseeing.
If I weed around the sage,
Letting it achieve its flower,
Do I make a kind of cage?
Do I claim a godlike power?
But the weeds are weeding me,
Cells that are, in acting, dying;
Sage-flowers fertilize the bee,
Every selling is a buying.
So creation is a cross,
“Let” and “be” in intersection,
Where the gain is in the loss,
And the death’s the resurrection.
“The Blackness of the Grackle” was originally published in Crosscurrents.
“An Apology for the Poem ‘The Blackness of the Grackle’" was originally published in
Frederick Turner: April Wind, University Press of Virginia.
“Let Be” was originally published in Frederick Turner: More Light, Mundus Artium Press.
“An Apology for the Poem ‘The Blackness of the Grackle’" was originally published in
Frederick Turner: April Wind, University Press of Virginia.
“Let Be” was originally published in Frederick Turner: More Light, Mundus Artium Press.
© 2019 Frederick Turner
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