GREAT MEN

by Kyle Gervais

 after Robinson Jeffers

Consider greatness.
A great man must have a following, and this is true,
as death, of Trump, who pulls like a fear-blind buffalo
the pressed herd onward, downward, over the land’s edge
to an imagined security. Kanye too is great,
is he not, in his crazy rage, and a yearning
turning, centrifuge fast, to an ever darker love?
But Elon’s greatness outpaces even these, demonstrably, incontrovertibly, 
one hundred twenty million 
massed numbers following him where he flutters, of all
such vast images that are not good, but great,
today the greatest.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems in Arion, Canadian Literature, Classical Outlook, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, Litbreak Magazine, PRISM international, and elsewhere.

WHAT HAST THOU DONE?

by Kyle Gervais

To be or not to be, the president 

asked all the world today, and chose the first.

And if he reached for the obvious, I don’t

begrudge a player of many parts his thrift.

 

But I in my distant unpolitical ease

have time to mine a deeper buried gem,

a coward king’s belated penitence:

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,

a brother’s murder.   

 

                    They weren’t the same, of course,

Abel and Cain, and Vladimir is not,

can never be, Volodymyr might say,

his brother’s keeper. 

 

                    But the men who crossed the line

on the map from west to east met men (and more

than men) with names like theirs, with songs and food

like theirs, with roots that reach, tangled, chafing,

downward deep in a fertile common soil.

 

And when the guns are stilled and angels’ mouths

have sung so many brave souls to their rest

above the earth that cries out with their blood,

one man will turn, and hide his face from God.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems, published and forthcoming, in Arion, Canadian Literature, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, Literary Imagination, PRISM international, and Triggerfish Critical Review.