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Sunday, March 15, 2009

SCRIM NEWS

by Robert H. Bunzel


The world news a
theatre scrim, an
opaque screen gone
ghost in front of
shadows mouthing
Yeats and beasts.
It is a time when
Rumpole dies and
no reprise makes
comedy of fate.
When walls we
built deleverage as
if the mortar
were sucked out.
So hard to see and
say goodbye to
striven folk who
join the lambs
in bread lines of
consultancy.
And confidence
when split and
dried will be the
stick to snap a
once proud west
to wars we’ve only
visited since TV
news went color.


Robert H. Bunzel was born in 1955, and lives in Piedmont, California. He is a practicing trial attorney in San Francisco, and 1978 graduate of Harvard College. His poems have appeared in local and national journals including Soundings East, Legal Studies Forum, Block’s Poetry Journal, Orphic Lute, Oxygen, Illya’s Honey, ZYZZYVA, White Pelican and Poet Magazine. He was president of the board of the literary tri-quarterly ZYZZYVA, “the last word in west coast writers and artists,” from 2002-2006.
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