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.
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