Why don’t the Portuguese have their own main?
Errol Flynn fights only Spanish baddies
Who twirl their moustaches in sneering disdain
And the villains are never Portuguese ladies

When ships do battle on Warner’s sound stage
The English are haughty, the Spanish snooty
Prince Henry’s brave men are never the rage
And the heroine is never a Lisboan beauty

Harken unto this repeated refrain:
Why don’t the Portuguese have their own main?

Borodin's On the Steppes of Central Asia

Lost in a remote province of the mind
A youth attends to the cheap gramophone
Again: On the Steppes of Central Asia,
A recording by a mill town orchestra
Of no repute.  But it is magic still:
While washing his face and dressing for work
In a clean, pressed uniform of defeat,
For ten glorious minutes he is not
A function, a shop-soiled proletarian
Of no repute.  Beyond the landlord’s window,
Beyond the power lines and the ***-holed street,
He searches dawn’s horizons with wary eyes
For wild and wily Tartars, horsemen out
To blood the caravans for glory and gold.
A youth greets the day as he truly is:
A cavalryman, a soldier of the Czar,
Whose uniform is stained with victory.

January with Blanket and Book

Dark weeks of wind and clouds and rain have passed
Into the east where wild storms go to die
While in the west above the woods the moon
A glowing curve of cold reigns over the sky

Now close the door after a lingering look
Upon silence and frost this January night
And dream by the fire, with blanket and book,
Sweet images of spring in the flickering light

And sunlight tomorrow - the frost won’t last
Long weeks of wind and clouds and rain have passed

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 3

     “O moments big as years!”

     -John Keats, "Hyperion"

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day opens in darkness cold
And on the radio the same dark news
That began this fading Gregorian year

But let us face this next turn of the time
With Aves on our lips and in our hearts
With the cold courage of Crusaders
And the cool kindness of missionaries

And may God grant that never again we ask:
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 2

     Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a      
     thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning
     of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is
     only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

     -Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day opens in darkness cold
And on the radio the same cold news
That began this fading Gregorian year

And ends it, churned by a news-o-matic
To be poured into an old plastic cup
As steaming-hot clichés to be consumed
By the devout, obedient faithful

The faithful, who worship a falling light bulb
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas 1

“Lest our old robes sit easier than our new”

Macbeth II.iii.37

Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?
This Octave day in darkness cold begins
And on the radio the same dark news
That began this fading Gregorian year

The well-turned compost heap of history
On which we flung the grounds and husks of hope
Expecting little, and so not disappointed
No resolutions, then, no black-eyed peas

No cabbage; let the months fall as they will:
Does the year fail, or is it we who fail?

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children

From an idea suggested by Kelly

No soldiers come, with glaring eyes, with death
To drag our children out into the road
To ****** away their lives into the dust
With pilum, gladius, or manly fist

With Romans as advisors standing by
Amid obscenities, curses, and screams
A fog of witness for that old excuse:
It’s all about the quality of life

Confusion now persuades with soft, soft breath
And therapists come, soothingly, with death.