A Preview of My New Book, This Poem, That Poem

 As I mentioned on FB, a sample of items from the latest book, This Poem, That Poem.  The first three are from the first section, "A Few Minutes Past the Hour;" the fourth is from "Thinking Like a Greek."   

The Funeral of Jennie Carlson Bourgo (Spring, 1952)

 

Both Jon and I were little boys,

and adult noise

was everywhere.

We must not stare.

 

There was some reason to be here,

that much was clear,

though Dad was mum,

and Mom seemed glum.

 

It was too hot, our collars tight.

None saw our plight.

Ringed by flowers,

we sat for hours.

 

Cain and Abel

 

Eons back in times of fable,

Cain killed Abel—

our starting point

put out of joint.

 

The first man born was first to kill,

a human skill

we rightly dread,

but will not shed.

 

The second was the first to die.

We could ask why,

but to what aim?

We know the game.

A Poem for My Diamond Jubilee

 

As I approached my seventy-fifth,

it seemed a myth,

some line from song,

to live so long.

 

If genes were all, I would be dust,

bereft of lust,

caught in the chill

that comes with still.

 

Instead I’m here and on my feet:

I feel the beat

and write my verse.

It could be worse.

 

The Best Laid Plans

 

“Actions always planned are never completed.”   (Democritus)

 

The aim we had, that perfect plan

too soon will wander out of hand.

 

Chance may hold sway and won’t be spurned;

here is the lesson to be learned:

 

all our work and best provisions

may necessitate submissions  

 

to the workings of cruel fate,

which never gets the story straight. 

 

 

My TV Appearance June 2020

 Here's a link to a TV appearance last June.  I am reading some of the work I posted on October 26, my winners in this year's state poetry contest.

https://www.bctv.org/video/poet-michael-bourgo-6-26-20/

Video of Mike discussing some recent work

 Here's a short video in which I discuss some of my recent work:

 https://youtu.be/Rb95tI9QnQ4

May 3, 1808 by Francisco Goya

 

May 3, 1808 by Francisco Goya

 

In his later years the Spanish artist

worked from the land of the deaf,

a state that may not ease life

but often among the very great

finds its role in art, the mind

adrift from all save its visions.

Incensed by Napoleon’s invasion,

and drawing  upon demons

he found in the depths of  silence,

he painted the horrors of war

and its violence to our humanity

at a pitch unmatched until Picasso.

Here, faces and bodies are posed

incredulous before the atrocities

of the French firing squad:

the Christ-like innocence

in the central figure, his arms

outstretched, as if on the cross,

joined by companions praying,

eyes and hands imploring mercy,

a pietà awaiting the arms of Mary—

all victims of a faceless monster,

the ordered ranks of legs and rifles                                                                                

formed into a symmetry of death, 

opposing the chaos of the terrified

caught in the jaws of gross evil,

the suffering of the helpless

in the last moment before the bullet.

 

Third Place Award, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020

 

Each Day

 Each Day

Each morning it’s the same--

both of us are on watch--

did he or she get up? If yes, 

all is good and we proceed,

for life is still our familiar:

we can relax once more 

over coffee and puzzles,

wander through the morning

as the sun goes on its climb

until it’s time for lunch,

and when sandwiches end,

as the sun begins to slope

and we are both still here,

we decide what’s for dinner.

Second Prize Award, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2o2o

A Dog in Heaven

 A Dog in Heaven

My wife wants to rejoin Maisie in heaven,

but I offer little encouragement--doubt is

a lifelong habit I’m not about to shake,

though both her tears and my old age 

have softened the edges: I’m unsure

of anything anymore, let alone heaven,

and even less about the afterlife of dogs;

but she remembers walks along the bluffs,

the way that Scottie adored a picnic,

recalls her futile barking at deer, 

the much-feared encounters with a skunk,

which, happily, never took place,

the sweet puppy smells the first night

that we brought her home to the cabin,

and that warm, furry presence sleeping

between our legs on cold January nights.  

Jerrie talks about Maisie’s wagging tail,

her tireless, crazy love for tug of war, 

how the dog seemed to relish travel,

its rewards of rest areas, motel rooms,

and old pals to greet at our destination;

and her fondest wish is to replay 

all those moments, but she’d settle

for any future time she could share

with that small dog bouncing beside her;

she can describe what they would do 

in the most careful details, no less real

than the days when she talked with Maisie, 

and her yearning is so earnest, so tangible   

that it assumes the mantle of reality--

the best-conceived of my realisms totters

before such fervor, and it is now clear

to me and all my rationality

that no philosophy can refute a dog.  

Second Place Award, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020

Before I Go

 Before I Go

Before I go, once again

I want to find a columbine

flourishing among the weeds

in some woe-begotten waste;

hear a bird I do not know,

whose song will make me shiver

like the first time I heard 

a wood thrush off in the dusk;

walk around an old oak

beneath its generous branches,

and feel the loyalty of its years

as it grips the soil beneath;

stand under a winter night

with its blanket of stars 

stretching from one side

of the world to the other;

and be so close to miracle 

I feel the breath of eternity.

First Place Winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020

  

The Death of the Unknown Man

The Death of the Unknown Man

 

“Johnstown police and the Cambria County coroner are working to identify the body of a man in his 60s who was found Friday inside a home in the Woodvale section of the city.”

-- News item from the Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pennsylvania), March 25, 2017

 

How fitting in a town with a past,

but cursed with a present tense

that does not seem to equal a future,

that today a man was found dead,

dead for at least three months,

and no one had noticed,

no family or friend to miss him,

utterly alone save for his pets,

sad little corpses found near him,

his last company on this earth,

all of them gone on to some eternal;

bodies that shared their love,

but were memorable to no one,

neither a neighbor nor the mail carrier,

not even a grocery clerk

like the one who looks for me every week.

 

In a world which seems so joined,

we forget the unconnected,

unmoored from human warmth

in a place unfurnished with kindness,

not even the careless greeting 

of those passing on a sidewalk.

How little comfort there is 

in pondering this man’s oblivion:

such an empty peace it is

to be merely removed from misery,

and so I keep musing about a hope--

 for a good beyond the absence of evil,

a passing dream, however faint, 

that somehow in the world of death

each of us will be always near

the touch of a hand that loves us.

 

First place winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020 

Day for Night

 Day for Night 

I have been pondering day and night,

and it seems clear to me 

that they are quite the opposite

of those images  folklore has favored--

the day as repository of life,

the hopeful spirits of light and sun

while night is  the dark country,

a stretch of gloom and death.

Consider the witness of the sun,

whose calendar rolls before our eyes,

and flowers that march to the clock:

they bloom, they shine, then fade.

The birds arrive, begin their songs, 

deserting us after their season,

leaving us the silences of August 

and the empty nests of November.

But the night contains eternity:

the cold beauty of forever in stars

on a late summer evening filled

with ageless planets sailing their orbs,

and holds the promise of dreams,

that blessed death until the dawn

when we wake again to live 

enclosed in the fatal arms of time. 

Grand Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, 2020

 

A Sample from Modern Times

1960

It was the new day of freedom in Africa: Ambassador Bunche had predicted that several nations would gain their independence; by year’s end the number was seventeen, free to fly their own flags and issue passports with proud new names.  Though Africa was ill-prepared for its future, thanks to its feckless former owners, celebrations reigned from Timbuktu to Lagos to Kinshasa as the former colonies took their place in the parade of nations, swelling membership in the UN to almost 100.  But the continent was immediate Cold War fodder, as in the case of Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of Zaire. Beset by rebellion in the army and secession movements, his pleas for help to the US were ignored, he was dismissed as a dirty Red, and his brief life closed in front of a firing squad. 

 

Scientists estimated the solar system to be five billion years old as the dawn of the space age unfolded, and the USSR and the US were in frantic competition: with Discoverer 13 (a spy satellite), the US was the first to recover an object from space—but the Russians soon topped that by sending two dogs into orbit and bringing  Belka and Strelka back alive a day later, unlike poor Laika, the first dog-naut, who did not survive her 1957 flight. The US scored another first with Tiros, a weather satellite, which issued forecasts of rain and sun for just 78 days before its technology burned out.  A bit lower in the aerospace, the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured the pilot and the plane’s gear,  thereby rebutting some lame US denials: all this fuss sabotaged a planned summit meeting and left a cloud hanging over Ike’s final months in the White House.

 

In a self-consciously modern era, technology marched on: the world reached a census of 100 million TV’s; the laser was patented; the first Xerox machine started copying bad jokes and unread reports; and a civilian nuclear reactor started up—but most of us still depended on oil, leading our suppliers to organize OPEC.  Despite a succession of court cases, Blacks remained second class citizens; Congress passed a useless civil rights bill, but Boynton v. VA outlawed racial segregation in public transit, which would point to the future Freedom Riders, and the roads where their buses would roll were changing America: towns with no ramps from I-95 went to sleep, while those with access were invaded by Holiday Inn, Howard Johnson’s and the malls.

 

French President De Gaulle was a busy man: his country started testing an A-bomb; he squashed yet another army insurrection in Algeria; and France switched to nouveaux francs, which forced le tout Paris to multiply and divide by a hundred while shopping. The US sent 3500 soldiers to Vietnam; the world’s first woman prime minister took office in Sri Lanka; after forty years of censorship we all got to read Lady Chatterley; Castro was steering Cuba towards the Soviet bloc; the planned city of Brasilia was opened; and Howdy Doody came to an end, as did any doubt that television consisted of ephemera.  JFK and Nixon debated on TV; the conventional wisdom was the debates tipped a close contest to Mr. Kennedy while the cynics and the Republicans called the election stolen.  Eventually the cries settled down and the country could either bask in the good feeling of To Kill a Mockingbird—or go to movies and scream as Janet Leigh took her infamous shower.

1963

We couldn’t expect much from a year that robbed us of four fine poets: MacNeice, Plath and Roethke, all much too young, and another, Mr. Frost, who was irreplaceable; as well as bringing record disasters—a landslide in Italy (2000 died), Hurricane Flora in the Gulf (8000 perished), and earthquakes in Yugoslavia (1000 lives lost).  It was the year both Studebaker and Alcatraz closed, of touch tone phones, ZIP codes, tape cassettes and pull tabs, and Tab itself, a fizzy anthem for our growing waistlines.  Mr. Warhol was painting soup cans and Brillo pads in a style called Pop Art, and Ms. Friedan published a book called the Feminine Mystique; any calculation of its influence is likely a gross underestimate.  Out in space, Telstar circled the globe, Mariner 2 reached Mars, and the Russians sent a woman into space; on earth we took notice of folk stars like Baez and Dylan, but by year’s end, it was those lads who wanted to hold your hand that were becoming the next rage, the first wave in the British invasion.   

 

For African Americans, the arc was at last bending: timid at first, the President found his conscience and was calling for change, James Meredith graduated from Ole Miss, George Wallace blustered but stepped away from the school door, and Dr. King gave us a monumental testimony in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.  Against the protesters, that city kept up its rear guard action to save white supremacy in the form of fire hoses, Bull Connor’s police, and the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church, which killed four little girls; but all this crass brutality nudged indifferent Northern whites to a measure of sympathy, and the year of struggle found its apotheosis in the March on Washington led in August by King, where a quarter million people assembled for rights, jobs and dignity.

 

Earl Warren’s court kept finding things that needed fixing: it ruled against Bible reading in public schools, which upset the pious; ordered defendants must have a lawyer, which rankled the law and order crowd; and expanded one man-one vote to more jurisdictions, which outraged rural politicians.  Nelson Mandela could have used some of that legal consideration for the accused; arrested in 1962, he was on trial and would be sentenced to life, and though apartheid still had thirty years to go, the world was taking a few first steps to isolate South Africa. Meantime, more new African nations emerged, raising UN membership to well over one hundred.  Americans didn’t know much about Vietnam, but the headlines were not reassuring—a growing number of American casualties, the very public self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, and an army coup late in the year that toppled President Diem.    

 

Our President had visibly learned a lot after the Bay of Pigs snafu, guiding his country through the nervous days of the Cuban missile affair, passing his tax plan, making a historic visit to Berlin, announcing a goal to reach the moon, proposing civil rights legislation, and negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty.  That fall, there was a new mastery in John Kennedy’s words and bearing as he went to Dallas on November 22—and then the shots rang out and the craziness broke loose.  Again we invoked the words Dicken had given us: it had been the best of times and now it was the worst, it had been a world where we hoped; now it was one where hopes were crushed; and when we did move forward again, it was with an inkling nothing could be the same again—and the years would confirm our every fear.   

Here's a short video of Michael reading the poem he wrote for the 2020 Penn State Poetry from Life project.  In partnership with Juniper Place, a local senior living center, local poets are matched 
with residents who have led interesting or noteworthy lives.  After 
meeting the residents and learning about their lives, the poets are tasked with writing a portrait in verse.  Michael's subject was Fred Thompson, 92, a noted local engineer and entrepreneur.

Because of the current health crisis the reading event had to be cancelled.  Each poet was asked to do a video and they will be uploaded to a web site at a future date.

Here is the URL:

https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/poems-life