7The Dusk Casts ShadowsThe dusk casts shadows on the drowning sun,Titanic's lights ablaze. She cleaves the sea,a mirror to the stars, her maiden run serene success by some divine decree.The falling swell has passed, the past astern.The last two days will spell “The Promised Land”each Steerage soul must face with some concern, with little else but landing grant in hand.In First, astern the barren promenade,the after-mast casts light in frosty arcson Ida Straus *, her furs, her pale pomade,and Isidor, in arm, as she remarks,before retiring to the plush saloon,
“The sea’s like glass this Sunday night. No moon.”
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8
“Iceberg dead ahead!”[11:40 p.m. April 14 1912]
“The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; …”Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867)The sea’s like glass this Sunday night. No mooncasts light upon the ice-pocked sea, where starsare cast in bituminous black, in tunewith Ages Past. Titanic flat-out scarsthe glassy sea her raking bowsprit cleaves:her splashing wake’s so cold her passengers must flee the promenades the starlight leavesin livid darkness.... where nothing stirs,and nothing stays the artificial breezethat snakes along the hull, and takes its pulseon brittle rivets, frozen; so they seizeupon the berg Titanic can’t repulse.Fleet * alerts the bridge, “Iceberg dead ahead!”
“Astern!” Propellers lash. The iceberg 's fled.
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RMS Titanic Centennial Sonnets 7 & 8. are excerpts from Richard Vallance's
Garland of Sonnets due for later publication, in - The Phoenix Rising from
the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium= Le Phénix
renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième
millénaire -now in the galley production stage at Friesen Press, scheduled
for release June 2013. ISBN: Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Paperback:
978-1-4602-1701-6 eBook: 978-1-4602-1702-3.
“The death camps were not built in the Gobi Desert. And when barbarism challenged, the humanities, the arts, philosophic thought proved not only largely impotent but often collaborative with despotism and massacre,”
–George Steiner, from ‘A New Literacy’, The Kenyon Review, 24:1, Winter 2007, 10-24
Teratogen 1: Sex on the Brain
“Thy nakedness shall be uncovered,
yea, thy shame shall be seen…”—Isaiah 47:3
This mission is a sin. What kind of spaz-
tic draws vigor from pornographic veins
or penis-headed parodies of ass?
But you’re no baby, Baby. Holy weans
alive, I could not diaper your fine mess.
You soil all metaphor. I’ll author blame:
My labs, my country tis of thee. My shame
is writ uncovered on your face. No less
you’d scare Sears’ portrait guy.
And yet I’m drawn
to parse the prick that promenades your head.
They told us, Horus, Set, the Golden Dawn:
a Third Eye—neither naked, neither dead
of shameless form would, near the end, arrive
commending those whose fear brought it alive.
Teratogen 2: Cabbage Patch Moll
“Hence world picture, when understood
essentially, does not mean a picture of the
world but the world conceived and grasped
as picture.” –Martin Heidegger
You vandalize distress at no small cost
through nylon skein and cabbage patch
disguise. This manhunt though is long since lost.
All have been found. First paparazzi snatched
unguarded moments. Then we watched gray puffs
televise precision. Your face
is pixelated aftermath that stuffs
everything in the close-up. Common place
covers all bases. Where’s the intimate
to hide? The convict is a partial judge
on all subjects of visual merit. Split
my screen and your forehead suggests a smudge-
print. We share the mounting headcount’s ripe bruise.
For I no longer feel eyewitness news.
Teratogen 3: Thumbelina, Dance
“…advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” –from Project for a New American Century (PNAC) Manifesto, 2000
We vet foot bills. Are pissed-on borders worth
a mongrel birth? doG gone us Pentagon.
Hotdog Girl rolls so we might rule the earth?
Our barking men of outrage are all gone.
Lassie’s come home to her unleashing hour.
Stream? I cannot stream out into the streets.
Fluoride neutered all my upright power.
I’ll litter no more dog-days in these sheets.
Poor pup, you play dead well. No, we’ll not lift
you up. One burp and you could well explode
across complicit shoulders. To the swift
life opens up. As for an honest road
with cars to chase, let’s first define your legs.
Right now you are a thumb. How motion begs.
Teratogen 4: Waterboy
“No, you people are drinkin’ the wrong water.”
–from The Water Boy, the movie (1998)
Suffer this baby floating on the earth
amphibious. Grace alone can mend
fluidic pustules. Please make haste. No berth
so wide of God, nor time-belabored End-
time should deflate ascent. Prospects look grim
for god-speed. Though we tire of boils and sore
feet.
Oh procrastinating seraphim,
whitewash no more. These mutants wash ashore.
Our amniotic seas now euthanize.
Please hear, oh Lord, water-boy’s gurgled cries.
His isotopic lungs cannot advance
beyond collapse. How does he stand a chance
of reaching Heaven, waterlogged on Earth?
The New Disorder liquefies at birth.
Teratogen 5: Burpee Girl
“Satan said: ‘I am not the one to prostrate
myself to a human being, whom You created
from sounding clay of altered black smooth
mud.” –Quran 15:30-35
Christian soldier, you battle your mortgage
with Abd al-Chuckee puppet-strings away,
sculpted like a Mujaheedin porridge
from amber waves of O, so gamma ray.
Our acronym-cadavers cyphered this.
The Pentagon got wind of ill-wind skies.
Re-baseline victory. All vectors miss
these eyesores too contained to leak out cries.
Children, don’t play! The cradle robs the grave
before the grave has time to rob your wild
unripened stares. Uranium defiled
His altered mud. God’s breath we, breathless, waive.
your fresh pink meat. While no one looked, life filed
your backstroke down to blisters. They will hide
your books in study hall. Who will arrest
this mutant form now terrorizing cells?
Without a clear and sewn-up threat the West
cannot hold the line. Deformity spells
doom. No tight-knit group of key advisors
props up your bloated puppet-string regime.
Sit up. Exude malevolence. Your sores
must find themselves else war will lose its steam
pressed irony. Don’t make us make Big Macs.
Cater our events. Weather our attacks.
Teratogen 7: Baby Skeletor (Brought to You by ‘Masters of the Universe’)
“Skeletor’s face accidentally got splashed with acid and he sacrificed his face to
survive.” –from ‘Masters of the Universe’, a Mattel media franchise
Before ill-winds impinged on faultless weather,
I had a barrow glazed with rain for you.
I’d wheel you to the bus-stop, but why lever
a father’s guilt atop your unhinged glue?
I’m loath to hold you up for God to see,
nor shower you with blue comforts. Why not flee
my too-short arms, your wails so out of key?
You scream small monster none the least at me.
I’ll prop you up at school if you insist.
But stand-up kids are cruel. They will resist
the womb’s last weapon, shrunken in their midst.
The universe won’t stoop. You are the grist
for chemistry swept under bazaar rug,
a Hazmat spill, the morning-after drug.
This series first appeared in The New Formalist, then Cinemension. Teratogen sonnets 5 and 7 will appear in ‘The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium Friesen Press, Victoria, B.C., Canada, 2013.
NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.
Jim Dunlap’s poetry has been published extensively in print and online in the United States, England, France, India, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand. His work has appeared in over 90 publications, including Potpourri, Candelabrum, Mobius, Poems Niedernasse, and the Paris/Atlantic. He was the co-editor of Sonnetto Poesia and is currently a Content Admin for Poetry Life & Times. www.facebook.com/PoetryLifeTimes He is also the chief proofreader for the On Viewless Wings Anthologies, published out of Queensland, Australia. In the past, he was a resident poet on Poetry Life & Times and the newsletter editor for seven years with the Des Moines Area Writers’ Network.
These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel where suns revolve around an axle star … Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours. Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel.
Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell? To see is not to know, but you can feel the tug sometimes: the gravity, the shell as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel
toward some draining revelation. Air: too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp. The stars invert, electric, everywhere. And so we fall, down-tumbling through night’s fissure:
two beings pale, intent to fall forever around each other—fumbling at love’s tether … now separate, now distant, now together.
Originally published by Sonnet Scroll
Michael R. Burch’s poems, translations, essays, articles and letters have appeared more than 2,000 times in publications which include TIME, USA Today, Writer’s Digest and hundreds of literary journals and websites. His poetry has been translated into Arabic, Czech, Farsi, Gjuha Shqipe, Italian, Macedonian, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese. He also edits www.thehypertexts.com.
