www.firesermon.com
by Michael R. Burch

your gods have become e-vegetation;
your saints—pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge
their images, right-click; it isn’t hard
to populate your web-site; not to mention

cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards
can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire];
your drives need added Zip; you must discard
your balky paternosters: ***!!! Desire!!!

these are the watchwords, catholic; you must
as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :)
if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard
to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust

of centuries of sameness;
                                            lameness *****;
your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust.

Published by Ironwood, Triplopia and Nisqually Delta Review. This poem pokes fun at several stages of "religion," all tied into Eliot's "Fire Sermon," albeit elliptically. (1) The Celts believed that the health of the land was tied to the health of its king. The Fisher King's land was in peril because he had an infirmity (lameness, infertility, it really didn't matter in those days). One bad harvest and it was the king's fault for displeasing the gods. A religious icon (the Grail) could somehow rescue him. Strange logic! (2) The next stage brings us the saints, the Catholic church, etc. Millions are slaughtered, tortured and enslaved in the name of religion. Strange logic! (3) The next stage brings us to Darwin, modernism and "The Waste Land.” Religion is dead. God is dead. Man is a glorified fungus! Long live Darwin! We'll evolve into something better adapted to life on Earth, someday (if we don’t destroy it first). But what do we have now, except a hangover? Strange logic! (4) The current stage of religion is perhaps summed up by this e-mail: the only way religion can compete today is as a form of flashy entertainment. ***** a website before it's too late!  Keywords/Tags: god, gods, religion, saints, icons, images, imagery, update, scale, adjust

The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

for Harvey Stanbrough

I have not come for the harvest of roses—
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer—
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

This poem was originally published by The Raintown Review when Harvey Stanbrough was the editor, then later by Mindful of Poetry. I wrote the poem out of dissatisfaction with the strange idea that poetry should consist entirely or primarily of concrete images. Would the “experts” who espouse this bizarre idea junk the great soliloquies of Shakespeare and Milton and the direct statement poems of A. E. Housman? It also bears noting that the twin titans of English modernism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, did an awful lot of “telling” rather than always “showing.” Keywords/Tags: Harvest, roses, images, imagery, imagism, meter, time, beat, rhyme, shimmer, gloss, perfume, reap, reaping, gossamer

Butterflies get all the love
Get all of the attention
Come out in daylight
When you can shine in the sun
Fold your wings
Beautiful to peer
Slender smooth stance
Grown in a fancy house

What about me?
I’m pretty too
Stout and fuzzy
Come out at night
Shining in the moonlight
Show my wings on display
Like a jet plane
Grown in modest house
Clothing not as daring as yours  
Name is small and dull

But I can still fly just as far
As you can... if I wanted
I’m not an ugly butterfly
You’re just a fancy moth

Pfennig Postcard, Wrong Address
by Michael R. Burch

(for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust)

We saw their pictures:
tortured out of our imaginations
like golems.

We could not believe
in their frail extremities
or their gaunt faces,

pallid as our disbelief.
They are not
with us now ...

We have:
huddled them
into the backroomsofconscience,

consigned them
to the ovensofsilence,

buried them in the mass graves
of circumstancesbeyondourcontrol.

We have
so little left
of them

now
to remind us ...

It was my honor to work with survivors of the Holocaust as we translated their poems and prose accounts into English as a way of preserving them and making them available to larger audiences. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and the Holocaust survivors I worked with are no longer with us. But their words and testimonies remain, if we will only take the time to read and consider them. Keywords/Tags: Holocaust, victims, survivors, mass graves, pictures, images, tortured, frail, gaunt, skeletal, emaciated, thin, malnourished, golemic, horror, terror, inhumanity, madness, racism, antisemitism, slave labor, slavery, death camps, concentration camps, gas chambers, ethnic cleansing, genocide, memory, remembrance, memorial, tribute

Huh - some hero
a broken man of broken dreams
found crawling from the ditch dredged by strangers
while his own ruination, a physical half-shell
emotional snakes and ladders

Ever courageous through – always the light-hearted of the herd
not quite nerdy but an intellect (of sorts)
a man of letters
sometimes “too many notes”

Poured from the gravy boat of left-overs
the wannabe saviour swims to rescue the damsel
whom he knows will know better
she’s seen his ilk before
all shining armour, will tarnish given time
those cathedral etchings from years gone by
with the sunlight shining from his mouth
spouting poetry from centuries past
nary an original thought will develop from what’s left
of his imagination
dulled by realities of daily news

The saviour has pledged allegiance
an honour to truth both unspoken and said
a respect for taking turns
to laugh, cry or feel nothing sometimes

The damsel knows he can’t make up his mind
about much at all.  

If he can’t save his own life – how the hell will
he ever pretend to prop hers

Huh – some hero.