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Showing posts with label Ahab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ahab. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

WET PROPHECY

by Gil Hoy


Image source: Politics PA


The sea is calling for you, like the Devil.
Like the father you could never best.
Like the Heavenly Father, you could
never see. Davy Jones’s locker is not
just a kid’s game. You deservith its depths.


Author’s note: My friend Devon made me do it.


Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who has studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared (or will be appearing) most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, TheNewVerse.News, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, and The Potomac

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

OUR AHAB

by Devon Balwit


Photo from William Thomas Online.


God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee … a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.


Daily, my stump percusses loss.
I punish the deck-timbers to-ing and fro-ing.
I hammer divots into pine. My underlings suspect
me mad but are too weak to topple me.
Somewhere a blanched and crenellated fin
froths the waters and flags my nemesis.
Bubble the very stench of hell
from my machinations, I will have him.
Not even my young wife slakes
this thirst. My gold doubloon
gaudies the mast. Whoever sings my foe
can pry it loose. I cannot sleep
for visions of ropes playing out
like spider silk, lance-men dangling
from his bulk. O to drain him and render him,
to spring a rib from his vaulted chest
and craft myself a new limb, an ivory needle
to tattoo the Earth with my passing over.
I count not the cost, so sweet my stupor.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.

Friday, November 04, 2016

REFLECTING ON MOBY DICK A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Wilda Morris


Image source: aNewDomain


We still have not learned
all the lessons that Melville taught:
the Union is not as united
as we once thought,
how easy it can be to drop prejudices
when we get to know
and love the pagan stranger,
the risks of empire building,
and how bowing to a self-absorbed
and vindictive leader puts us all in danger.

If Melville were writing today
the crew would grow from thirty
to fifty, as many as the states
that could sink into the abyss
if we leave this election to the fates.
We may be on the brink.


Wilda Morris has a doctorate in political science from American University in Washington, D.C., but instead of becoming a political scientist, she ended up as a poet. Her blog provides a monthly contest for other poets.

Friday, October 09, 2015

THE LIMITS OF POWER

by Michael Shorb



“Sen. McCain Expects A Permanent U.S. Presence In Afghanistan” —NPR headline, October 7, 2015. Photo: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan walk away from a helicopter at Forward Operating Base Connelly in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Aug. 13. The U.S. formally ended combat operations in Afghanistan at the end of last year. But nearly 10,000 American troops remain in the country and the U.S. frequently carries out air sorties. Fourteen American military personnel have died in Afghanistan this year. Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images via NPR.



A king declared the stars
illegal, not to be seen,
each night thousands were
executed for seeing them,
the king ran out of people
before the sky ran out of stars.

21st century Samson’s
swinging a nuclear jawbone
over his head,
21st century Ahab
kills Moby Dick and lights
ten thousand lamps
ten thousand days.
21st century America’s
gonna control the middle east
with drone missile launchers
and federal air support.

I’m the news no-one listens to.
The TV droning on in a corner,
the politician proudly announcing:

“We’re in Afghanistan
for the long haul.”


Michael Shorb was a poet, fiction writer, editor, and children's book author. As an international poet, his poetry has been published in more than 100 magazines and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Michigan Quarterly, The Nation, The Sun, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Kyoto Journal. He was the recipient of a PEN AWARD, won a Merit Award for the Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lived in and loved San Francisco. Michael succumbed to GIST, a rare form of cancer in 2012.


Editor’s Note: Michael’s widow Judith Grogan-Shorb sent TheNewVerse.News this eerily timely poem which Michael wrote soon after the United States first invaded Afghanistan.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

DON’T JEWISH

by Max Ochs


from Moby Dick or, The Whale. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent published by The Modern Library, New York, 1930


“I have no objection to any person’s religion, be that as it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person doesn’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; and makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. “   —Herman Melville


1
Attending Eastport Methodist’s annual Interfaith
New Years Eve service, I hear an Imam’s lovely voice;
it hearkens me to myriad wondrous childhood hours
in the synagogue we called Shul, where I loved to hear
my Hebrew cantor in prayer. A number was tattooed
on his forearm; his fierce eyes had witnessed the camps,
unspeakable things. Blessed be Reb Hammer, who taught
me to sing: Boruch Atah Adonai.
This Imam was singing  in the same heartfelt, earnest
and strict way as Rev. Hammer. That made me love
the Imam, as he called upon Allah, as a cousin. As family.
He disappeared before I could shake his hand,
look him in the eye and say: Salaam, you and I
both spermed down from one ancestor, Abraham,
upon whom God called, demanding sacrifice;
the same son I call Isaac and you call Ishmael,
a name which now narrates Moby Dick.

The image of Ishmael looking to knock someone’s
hat off in New Bedford, summons the mythology
of my father’s stories of being a tough
young street fighter, ready and rough.
Sound his name, Isaac, as a sudden laugh aloud.  
In 1927, Izzy clenched his fists in Far Rockaway,
and felt just as  punchy as brother Ishmael had
100 years before, opting to up with Ahab, aside
a devout cannibal, the harpooner Queequeeg;
Ahab the white-whale-chasing monomaniac.

1927, in Queens, a politically dangerous time
and place to out as Hebrew, around rival gangs.
Don’t Jewish (you were white). Don’t signify.
Not only Medical schools, even city sidewalks
had Jewish quotas; the system was biased then,
we heard, in favor of [LOL] waspy men.
Don’t you wish you were not? All that singing,
with a crying voice, like gypsies! Opt for the above
and kiss shiksas under the Brooklyn boardwalk.
Let them play tennis, where nothing means love.

Neither today is it fun to be statistically sucked in
to prison by society’s vacuum for being like Queequeeg
or Huck’s Jim, a brown male. My friends, already tired
of Ferguson, can’t identify; Ebola hemorrhaging in Africa,
eyesore ISIS spreading down Levant its blue videos of death
by beheading. My friends still watch TV, but any more
news and they’ll get depressed. I start to spout
war-warn rhetoric, my sermon about our future.
Our weary globe’s a-warming; no peace for Arab, Jew;
holy elephants poached for tusk, rhinoceros for horn;
Chestnut trees, honey bees, cod fisheries disappear.
Old species gone, sperm whales sure as you’re born.

Queequeeg’s Black Yojo Doll, Ishmael accepts;
The entire world’s other brands of religion too.
As long as it doesn’t insult or try to kill him.
Okay, for once, irony: darkness escapes light.
Ain’t no fluke, an enemy compels us to war.
Again. Honey, I know, but this time, even if
this be our fathers again, looking for a fight:
Maybe we’ve got just cause, and we ought.
And Jim shall have a song in scary cells of jail.
One sermon sold “inherent dignity”; I bought.
Avast, thou!  Ye haven’t seen the white whale?

When the Imam calls the population to prayer,
so all may pray together to the all-powerful creator,
remember Ishmael’s example: tolerate anybody’s
faith if they will, in turn, tolerate yours. Don’t
you wish you were free? Then pray on your knees
in the hospital with Ahab and the other amputees.


For decades, Annapolis poet Max Ochs used “stolen moments” to scribble poems at night while working by day for his county’s anti-poverty agency and the local conflict resolution center. Like his famous cousin, songwriter Phil Ochs, Max has maintained a faith in what organizers can do for just causes. Many poems reflect on his career as mediator, activist and teacher; others chronicle an ongoing dialogue between a “failed atheist” and the gods. Archived podcasts of his poetry and music can found on Grace Cavalieri’s “The Poet and the Poem” (Library of Congress website).  A “primitive American” musician, Ochs learned his licks from some blues greats: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House, all of whom stayed with him in New York City. Tompkins Square records, which depicted Ochs as an “Obscure Giant of Acoustic Guitar," featured four of Ochs’s poems on the 2005 CD, Hooray for Another Day. Ochs lives with his wife, Suzanne, on the picturesque Severn River, just north of Annapolis, Maryland.