RONDEL ON ISAIAH 58:12

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

"Election Results" by Kadir Nelson

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called repairer of broken walls, restorer of streets with dwellings. —Isaiah 58:12

The repairer of breaches,
restorer of paths

has won by a handbreadth.
Now legions of leeches
and star-belly sneetches
drag out the aftermath.
Maintain the breaches!
Block all the paths!

Enough with the screeches
of stokers of wrath
indifferent to megadeaths.
Heed him who teaches
repairing of breaches,

restoring of paths!

Esther Greenleaf Murer is a longtime contributor to The New Verse News. She lives in Philadelphia.

CAPO GHAZAL

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

Of course I’ll release the funds.  But first, do me a favor.
No, of course you’re not being coerced—just do me a favor.

Those shitholes out there are trying to undermine me!
They have to be slimed and aspersed, so do me a favor.

Help me out with this and I’ll invite you to the White House.
Just do your best (i.e. worst) and I’ll take it as a favor.

Rudy is coming with an offer you can’t refuse:
end up in the Dnieper feet first, or do me a favor.

This transcript is going to the secret computer system,
so forget that we ever conversed; just do me a favor.

Esther Greenleaf Murer is a longtime contributor to the TheNewVerse.News.  She lives in Philadelphia.

VILLANGHAZALLE WITH FAUNA

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    at brilliancy of colors bleached to white;
    rage, rage against the dying of the coral reef.
 
elkhorn, staghorn, pineapple, red cauliflower, mushroom, precious red, blue, organpipe, star, brain, torch, cup, sun, bubble, cactus, column, finger, flowerpot, pillar, table, tube, stone, fire

    Before we've even plumbed the trove of life
    that shelters there, prey to manmade blight,
    we rampage, rampage, killing off the coral reef.

purple stovepipe sponge, striped cleaner wrasse, batwing coral crab, slipper sea cucumber, tomato clownfish, yellow nudibranch, magnificent feather duster, nurse shark, marine iguana

    At last we claim the ocean as our fief;
    ours is the absolute, God-given right
    to wage, wage war against the coral reef.

blue spotted sting ray, saddleback butterflyfish, sea whip, chambered nautilus, variable boring sponge, regal tang, purple sea urchin, olive ridley sea turtle, acropora crab, sharpnosed puffer

    When Gaia bore us, she produced a thief
    who, armed with outsize trawls and dynamite,
    would stage, stage the dying of the coral reef.

harlequin shrimp, reticulate brittle star, somber sweetlips, blue-ringed octopus, loggerhead turtle, minifin parrotfish, brown volcano carpet sponge, orange fireworm, flamingo tongue cowrie

    our legacies (and may our time be brief)
    of plastic scum and seas acidified
    presage, presage the dying of the coral reef.

deceiver fangblenny, chicken liver sponge, Christmas tree worm, yellow-bellied sea snake, zebra shark, flying gurnard, sunflower starfish, leafy sea dragon, spiny lobster, zooxanthellae

    The news continues dire, with no relief,
    no end to blind rapacity in sight.
    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    but rage, rage against the killing of the coral reef.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century.  She was brought up on Thornton Burgess's Seashore Book for Children and has a lifelong interest in invertebrate paleontology. 

GROUND RULE

by Esther Greenleaf Murer






The common or garden good is a weed
strayed from a Communist plot.
Don’t believe those who loudly proclaim that we need
the common or garden good; it’s a weed
that threatens to crowd out the flowers of greed
by claiming our gains are ill-got.
So root out that noisome and noxious weed—
send it back to its commie plot.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century. She lives in Philadelphia.

ELECTION RONDEL

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

Image source: San Diego Democrats for Equality

Primaries, conventions, elections—                  
spectacularly staged surrogates for old dreams
of candidates who dare to espouse bold schemes
for taking the country in fresh directions,
who dare to speak on great-souled themes,
dare to engage the voters' affections;
Primaries, conventions, elections—                  
spectacularly staged surrogates for old dreams.  
Makeup artists mediate complexions
with powders, liners, blushes and cold creams,
and behind the scrim the aura of gold gleams:
what matters is pleasing those powerful connections.
Primaries, conventions, elections—                  


Author’s note: repeating lines from Anselm Hollo, "The Dream of Instant Total Representation.”

Esther Greenleaf Murer, a relic of the 20th century, lives in Philadelphia. She published a poetry collection Unglobed Fruit in 2011. In a faraway time and place she was a pollworker and precinct committeeperson.

DUCIPER OF INK-MOLINE

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

When in the cost of harbored escallops,
it becomes natant for one phoenix
to decollate the perflewed barbs
which have caboshed them with argent,
and to arch among the pythons of the embattled
the sinister and erased spread eagle
to which the lindworms of nebuly
and of nebuly's gunshot endorse them,
a debruised rapier to the ogress of milkrind
retorts that they should dovetail
the carbuncles which incense them
to the salamander.

We harbor these truncheons to be subverted,
that all mounts are confronté erect,
and that they are engrailed by their cockatrice
with crampant impartible rouelles,
that among these are lures, liver-birds
and the panache of hippogriffs.

That to spancel these rouelles,
gauntlets are inflamed among mounts,
decollating their jacent pythons
from the carbuncle of the gorged, –
that whenever any fluke of gauntlet
becomes diapered of these ermines,
it is the rouelle of the phoenix
to accost or to asperse it,
and to inflame a new gauntlet,
lodging its fasces on such popinjays                        
and oppressing its pythons in such fluke,
as to them shall soar most latticed
to embow their shakefork and hippogriffs.


Author’s note: Oulipo: Translexical translation - replace significant words with specialized vocabulary from another discipline. In this case, the Glossary of Heraldic Terms.


Esther Greenleaf Murer, a relic of the 20th century, finds the news pretty surreal these days. She is June featured poet in KIN Poetry Journal.  Her first collection, Unglobed Fruit, appeared in 2011.