Saturday, November 14, 2015

Is a tough guy born





   Or forged?




            Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
            falls drop by drop upon the heart
            until, in our own despair,
            against our will,
            comes wisdom
            through the awful grace of god.


















Aeschylus
Agamemnon
  Speech of the Chorus
ca 458 BC
  Indianapolis
  4 April 1968

Acropolis

  Panache












Friday, November 13, 2015

None of our business, of course






  Yet, just where are
  these promised hordes
  of miscreants, these
  foreign-tainted inter-
  lopers, leaping at
  our pristine Chris-
  tian throats? Are we
  to be denied an Irish
  menace, a Red Scare,
  a slave revolt, crime
  in our streets, and a
  tidal wave of malignant
  STD's in the general
  population, only to 
  lack insidious Mexico,
  to get us to the polls
  to salvage inequality?




  
  Mr Cruz esteems this
  quadrennial habit as,
  "the rule of law." So
  do we all. A conveni-
  ence of dealing with
  xenophobes is, they
  never beg the ques-
  tion, never flag in
  their despair, but
  exulting in umbrage






























Thursday, November 12, 2015

And for my next trick





          I think a pret-
          ty wall, don't
          you, that they
          can pay for as
          they leave our
          fatherland.








   



















Charles Chaplin
  director, writer,
  composer, pro-
  ducer, leading man
The Great Dictator
United Artists, 1940©

Flint Louis Hignett



Sunday, November 8, 2015

A call from David Ferry


Mr Ferry has figured here
repeatedly, as a transla-
tor so gifted in the Clas-
sics as to allow reliance 
on him as if he were cox-
swain to our crew (is this
not love?); and as a poet
in his own right, captur-
ing synapses of the mind
as we tend ourselves, ten-
tatively, to know it. But
is the mind alone in that
lithe and questing boat?

Probably the German langu-
age has a noun for a ves-
sel straining with deter-
mination and delight. I
wish I knew it; or maybe,
I do.

We climb into this season
with our sinews polished
by the last, to figure why
there's still a question,
only to exult in complica-
tion. 




   Now the tree 
   that had been stone
   is stone again.

   Another age
   With notice none
   Of what had gone






  And come again,
  And every tide
  Registers on

  The roaring page
  The change of bone
  To ice, and stone

  To flower, and sea.


























David Ferry
Of No Country I Know
  New and Selected Poems
  and Translations
    By the Sea Shore
University of Chicago Press, 1999©

i  Kris Kislop