For Caira Doheny, My Irish Muse


"Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame."

An Exhortation, st. 1 (1819)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Let us intimate a Poetic Competition,
Tween an Irish lass,
and a New York Jew,
I shall serve, and you,
You shall return

A contest:
Our tongues, our racquets,
Across the table,
The words shall bird fly,
Across the net,
Couplets and haiku
Shall smash and whistle

The winner will be the one
The God of Poetry
Accepts for permanent servitude

You **** my poetic soul forever
With the currency of praise genuine,
Authentic, flowing and fulsome,
Awarding me the Medallion Doheny
Cash value, a mere Irish penny,
But to the poet, the food of love and fame

Genetic to your nature,
You exhale word rhythms,
Excitable and interrupting,
Speech free flowing,
Tho I am of the People of the Book,
You, by birthplace,
Are unfair poetry advantaged

All your utterances
Are action heroes of the heart,
And I fail miserable to capture
The poetry you breathe out

Your Irish praise me awarded,
Tis now the
Standard and the Curse
This benighted amateur
Must now Prometheus nurse

One day in Dublin, shall we meet,
In a country where poetry is the
Iron in the people's blood

In a particular pub
Opposite we will sit,
You, a cowboy by adoption,
Me, the dastardly banker

You know the pub,
I, with my pint,
You, with your diet coke,
And the only lingua Franca
Shall be darts of poetry
In a language our own,
A collective work we will weave,
A blessed unity, a single tongue now,
Lilting, singing, bespoke

We will let the singer-poet laureate**
Of the island we now share, moderate,
Over his piano man's gin and tonic,
As we do as Yeats instructed:
Between us,

"A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem {but}
a moment's thought,
our stitching and unstinting
has been naught"