BOY TURNED GIRL

by William Ruleman

Image source: National Geographic

You gaze from the face of the magazine at me,
And you are beautiful, I have to say,
Despite an impish male audacity
That lingers round your lips and eyes the way
A lad will do when forced into a fray.
O brave new world indeed, when we can change
Impediments in us that make us strange
To all the wonder that most suits the soul!
Some surgeries can show us who we are—
Can heal us, make us healthy, human, whole—
And whether love is near to us or far,
We know how we will meet it, play our role.
Not so when manmade tribal mutilations
Cheat the flesh of heavenly sensations!
The Lord God guard you from all hate and harm:
Self-righteous rants and priggish piety,
Lascivious longings and resentment’s storm.
May you find in saints’ society
A means to keep your heart and senses warm,
And may your offspring—if you have them—know
The gracefulness and courage you now show.

Editor's Note: Meanwhile . . . "A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals this week lifted a lower court injunction that had stopped the implementation of what many legal observers and LGBTQ activists view as the worst, most dangerous legislative attack on LGBTQ people yet. . . . The law allows for businesses and government employees to decline service to LGBT people, and that includes bakers, florists, county clerks and even someone working at the department of motor vehicles, based on religious beliefs. It allows for discrimination in housing and employment against same-sex couples or any individual within a same-sex couple. Businesses and government, under the law, can regulate where transgender people go to the bathroom. The law allows mental health professionals and doctors, nurses and clinics to turn away LGBT individuals. It also allows state-funded adoption agencies to turn away LGBT couples." —Michelangelo Signorile, "Queer Voices," HuffPost, June 23, 2017

William Ruleman resides in east Tennessee. His newest books include the poetry collections From Rage to Hope (White Violet Press, 2016) and Munich Poems (Cedar Springs Books, 2016), as well as his translations of Hermann Hesse’s early poems (Cedar Springs Books, 2017) and Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel Clarissa (Ariadne Press, 2017).

KLANSMEN

by William Ruleman

The self-proclaimed largest Ku Klux Klan group in America plans to rally outside the South Carolina statehouse next month, state officials confirmed. --The Washington Post, June 30, 2015

Good Christian men in white
Ride into the night
To keep their women pure
And families secure.

Good Christian men in white
Know that they are right
But tend to wait till dark
Before they will embark

(Good Christian men in white),
For their own brand of might
Tends not to thrive by day
On what mild judges say.

Good Christian men in white
Wake to see dawn light,
Their white robes stained in mud,
Stallions’ foam, and blood.


William Ruleman’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Galway Review, The New English Review, The New Verse News, The Pennsylvania Review, The Recusant, The Road Not Taken, Rubies in the Darkness, The Sonnet Scroll, and Trinacria. His books include two collections of his own poems (A Palpable Presence and Sacred and Profane Loves, both from Feather Books), as well as translations of poems from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (WillHall Books, 2003), of Stefan Zweig’s fiction in Vienna Spring: Early Novellas and Stories (Ariadne Press, 2010), of prose and poems by Zweig in A Girl and the Weather (Cedar Springs Books, 2014), and of poems by the German Romantics in Verse for the Journey: Poems on the Wandering Life (also from Cedar Springs Books). He is Professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan College.

SAINT VALENTINE

by William Ruleman

Saint Valentine baptizing Saint Lucilla by Jacopo Bassano

There might have been two of you,
But whether either existed,
No one knows for sure.
Dismissing petty facts,
One finds your stories true:
The evil have ever resisted
Those whose hearts are pure
And dedicated to acts
Of healing like your own.
You had the power to cure,
And in this, you persisted,
And for this are not alone.

In fact, your numbers are many;
Your foes, detractors, legion;
Those you have healed, more so
(They hail from countless lands).
Turning up like a good penny
In dreariest town or region
To let the sickest know
How laying on of hands
Can clear the clouded eye
And cool the fevered brow,
Dispelling the wish to die;
You are with us even now.


William Ruleman is Professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan College, and his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including, most recently, in The Galway Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal,  The Pennsylvania Review, and The Road Not Taken.