Four Perceptive Poems by Stephen Anderson

 

the forge

 

america is a newborn loaded up 

with notions of democratic grandeur 

yet-to-mature, america is every 

sweat-john & jane doe

treading on its backbone trying to find

their own song, america is everything

to Lady Liberty, but shift-shaped nightmares

to most of the people pounding its streets,

america is the victim of historical spasms of 

hypocrisy, people being dislocated from land 

to land by others locating on that land, america

has had its share of vile corruption that has

rotted our roots, america is contented customers, 

with its Fords, Chevys, Oldsmobiles, Coca Cola 

& Marlboros, rich oil & gas & coal & lest we forget 

steel companies that all built this hulking, guzzling 

juggernaut phenomenon that still is a home & isn’t a home 

to its huddled masses, those good-faith immigrants

sprung far & wide with constitutionally-derived 

notions from the framers of this novice, upstart

nation that has rewarded only those who

circle up their wagons to fend off any perceived 

adversity, america is children hiding under their 

school desks to avoid death by gunfire, america 

is a child of change but doesn’t yet know it, america 

has become divided, like it or not, into distinct blue 

& red territories, primed & prepped for a clash,

a fragmentation of brothers & sisters, family & friends, 

a condition of cultish, cultural clash very apt to bleed 

america into a moribund coma, not unlike that of a 

terminally-ill child still dreaming like Horatio Alger 

to someday become whole.

 

                                               

Time is a curious messenger 

 

of facts, slippery slants

of perception, now as I sit

contemplating the colorful, intricate

design of the room’s Persian rug, the

black piano, elephant figurines, the 

art from India adorning the walls,

 

all objects of a bona fide earthly nature, 

of things as imagined by Lucretius, testaments

of the human spirit, of human endeavor in 

sculpture, craft and weave, everything essential, 

masterworks shaken loose from their creators, 

now transported here before me, tokens

of everything ideal in the heart of things, 

gifts of wisdom and integrity,

 

so that their songs resonate around

a soul.                   

 

 

Day Token

 

It was a city 

chased by ideas

& dreams

 

It is place of

loneliness & dislocation

now

 

where drab buildings

mold souls into escape

fantasies, into

 

the realm of imaginary

forests of lithograph-like

trees that fade

 

into gray, gnarled phantoms

of themselves as they 

envelope the figure

 

who imagines them in his

journey through days

of darkness.

 

         

burnt roses

 

the picture is of a mother

doting on the young child

she is hugging, the child smiling

with the look of promise in his eyes,

the one his mother wishes for him,

 

a nice child, bright faced 

looking into the future with his

child’s vision, his mother in 

rapture with the promise of it all.

 

the mother is all around the world,

Iran, Ecuador, Syria, Ukraine, Mozambique,

Chile, et cetera. It doesn’t matter where because

it is just the global, parental hand of love

 

no matter what the child may become, the

love of mother for child is omnipresent, 

universal even though at times the power lords 

of the world do not judge it so, and some of those

children may grow up into men somehow

 

installed in unimaginably grotesque lives

filled with the bullet-holes of poverty

and dead end lives — religious pawns

to the King of something malicious—

an unfortunate affiliation, a snare with

 

a seeming lock on everything that 

casts them into the projectiles that 

carry them so far from the child in 

the picture, the one that had once 

so warmed their mothers’ hearts.

Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and translator whose work has appeared in Southwest Review, Latin American Literature Today, Verse Wisconsin, Foundling Review, Twist In Time, Tipton Poetry Journal, New Purlieu Review, Free Verse, POETiCA,REViEW, Life And Legends, Blue Heron Speaks, as well as in numerous other print and online journals. He was the recipient of the First Place Award in the Wisconsin Fellowship Of Poets 2005 Triad Contest, and he received an Honorable Mention in the WFOP’s 2016 Chapbook Contest. Many of his poems have been featured on the Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM Lake Effect Program.

Anderson is the author of three chapbooks, as well as two full length collections, In the Garden of Angels and Demons (2017) and The Dream Angel Plays The Cello (2019.) In the summer of 2013, six of his poems formed the text for a chamber music song cycle entitled The Privileged Secrets of the Arch performed by some musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and an opera singer. Anderson’s work is being archived in the Stephen Anderson Collection in the Special Collections Section of the Raynor Libraries at Marquette University.