December 2020
Bio Note: My poem-a-day 2020 journal ran into election week last month with all its attendant
anxieties. These poems reflect the anxiety of going to bed when things looked bad and fearing to hear the
worst in the morning, and a couple of responses to the eventual result. I began publishing poetry five years
ago when the late Firestone Feinberg accepted a handful of poems for Verse-Virtual. Lately I'm trying to write
a poem every day, work on a novel about Thoreau, and file one story a week for the Boston Globe. For poems,
flower pics, and occasional politics see www.prosegarden.blogspot.com.
The Morning After the Morning After
I’m stepping back from the ledge.
The view from there is sickening,
a landscape roamed by entitled monsters
on whom we have pinned badges of honor
for so much crapping on the landscape.
Specimen days in a ravaged land:
sticks with dead flowers, stones with the faces
of people one might have known.
Today, a week from a killing freeze,
the sun shines on the still-breathing leaves
and the compost bin keeps churning.
We walk the edges of a fault line
burned by the frost of a dead man’s embraces,
watching spellbound as the monster bleeds out,
but dare not yet descend
into the pit.
11.05.20
There Will Be Consequences
Now let us deal with the others,
the enablers of the old regime.
First thoughts, anyone?
Yes, I do recall, we have on record a proposal
for a guillotine in Lafayette Park --
and, oh, such a wide pool of candidates
choosing, perhaps, to say goodbye with their boots on,
and so much more humane than the slow strangulation
of oblivion.
Names? Of course.
Who doesn’t have a little list?
They never will be missed.
We’re only speaking in fun, understand,
unlike the authors of the children’s
concentration camps,
the supremely white policy-poobahs, the coat-hanger judges,
the gang of fossils still burning forests,
decapitating mountains
to dig up their favorite pollutant product-additives –
Or, perhaps, only—I say again—in the spirit of jest,
how about a Walk-Through Desert theme park,
water rationed, food a mere hunger-dream,
armed harassers snooping after you,
destroying the parcels angels secretly hid for you,
and then another wire fence, uniformed screws,
followed by a purgatorial return to the birthplace of suffering?
And how about some actual Dante-esque justice
for those who glory in inflicting pain on others?
Merely a devilish temptation, I know,
but might the truly higher judges
gavel it through?
11.07.20
That November Feeling
That soft twilight, warm evening feeling,
right on top of the gut-check fragility that comes
from not having the storm windows up,
or wood to burn,
or any place to burn it
The last cricket
The first winter bird
The sophisticated half-tones of dying leaves
who know how to put on a show
and still, after all these years,
haven’t gone complacent and given in to the temptation
to show all their tricks
at the first spell of forecast-panic
and say, ‘There, are you happy?”
No, too much self-respect,
in trees, if not always in bipeds
Somebody’s Dad walking home
Evening now, it gets late early
and so suddenly,
the peach-fuzz pink of the gently fading sky
like the remark
you wish to extend, like an offering,
like a jewel,
at the lighting of the lights,
but can’t quite polish
The ‘turn’
that turns once again to teach you
everything you need to know
about turning
Oh my–thank goodness!–
back here again.
11.06.20
©2020 Robert Knox
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. -JL