Today’s Special: *** Roast with Two Sides

                For W.K. Kortas, re his Wednesday Meatloaf

It’s an unusual *** roast, of course
Having only two dimensions, two sides
Incomplete on the space-time continuum
But free of fat, gristle, and growth horsemones

You can’t take a picture of it in 4-D
Because it appears only in 2-D
But how did you like the presentation
In a bed of herbivores all named Herb

It’s an unusual post roast discourse
In featuring only two sides of a horse

“Thy people shall be my people”

                                          -Ruth 1:16

Smoke rises here from foul Gehenna’s fires
Fires set by souls twisted like cold barbed wire
Sole argument of ideologies
Strung geometrically from hate to hate

Smoke rises here; soft ashes fall as death
Torah, Mishnah, and Gemera – and us
For without the Word and the People Israel
We are but wraiths, and darkly blown about

O Israel!

You are the broom tree in the wilderness
The Tree of Life who shelters all with love
You are the tent of Sarah and Abraham
And we are blessed who find refuge in you

In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could find nothing more interesting to think of than his own prestige.

                        -C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost

Just look into the mirror, and there you are
Could lose a little weight, but there you are
You comb your hair, you brush your teeth, and then
You should always remember to make a face

And laugh

For you are not a sloganed comrade-hat
Nor yet a shadow in a marching mob
A noise, a post, a bumper-stickered oaf
An obedient tool being pushed about

Because

You are not a tagged and labeled identity
But a true child of God: brave, loving, and free

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new” 1

On that cold night Sir Bedivere looked long
Into the dawnlight where three Queens gold-crowned 2
With Arthur passed at last into the West
And the sun rose, but not upon the King

Then in the silence of the raw new year
A masterless knight turned unto the hills
And after wanderings there took the cowl
And among new faces told the beads of worlds

For us – our old year too is someone’s new
With quiet grace and faith we pass from view


1 This line appears both in “The Coming of Arthur” and in “The Passing of Arthur” in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, framing the arcing narrative.

2 The three Queens, too, appear in “The Coming of Arthur” and in “The Passing of Arthur.”  They are perhaps symbols of faith, hope, and charity from 1 Corinthians.

It’s not marijuana in Newfoundland
In our fair Island we call it Product, b’ys
Son, have you been smokin’ Product again?
This is some **in’ great Producttttttttt, ohhhhh, mannnnnnn

Mr. Speaker, why is there a shortage
Of Product in the province, Mr. Speaker,
Not worried about the stocks of cod if we
Can get stocks of Product, Mr. Speaker

And if the shipment from the mainland stalls
They’ll beam us some Product from Muskrat Falls

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If you don’t believe in something you’ll fall
For anything – but what if that something
In which you believe was that anything
For which you fell in the first place?

And what if that anything for which you fell
Was the something you ought to have believed
Before you fell into the anything
That maybe wasn’t there at all?

If you don’t believe in something you’ll fall
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