THIS MAN, 2024

a cento by Jacquelyn Shah

Source: Stablecog

How will the future reckon with this man?

  ––Edwin Markham, “The Man with the Hoe”

   

There is no shape more terrible than this––

. . . dangerous man . . .

ignorant demagogue . . .    

inscrutably smiling

thick with power oozed over branches,

the capitalistic offices

   . . . makes us all turn green with fright

and through the green his crimson furrow grooves.

He must have come up from a drain.

Knowing this man . . .

(mean, underhanded, lacking all attributes . . .)   

is a man who makes avenging armies.

He makes of laws

a broken staff,

disturbs polite conversation . . .

The knotted fabric of our lives,

our words, our lives, our pains––nothing!

We talk despairingly and drink our tea,

everyone a life alone.

All day, all night, we hear, we feel,

men, women in cities, multitudes, millions.

The dead and the dead

of spirit now joined . . .     

All––only putty that tyranny rolls

between its fingers . . .     

Poor people make poor land.

Author’s Note: Cento—lines & partial lines (occasional slight alterations), in order of appearance, from: Edwin Markham; Sarah N. Cleghorn, Cleghorn; Lola Ridge; Archibald Fleming; E. B. White; William Rose Benét; Roy Campbell; Alfred Hayes; Edwin Rolfe; Selden Rodman; S. Funaroff, Funaroff; Oscar Williams; Josephine W. Johnson; Baratolomeo Vanzetti; James Palmer Wade; James Agee; William Stephens; Eunice Clark; Frederic Prokosch, Prokosch; Hugh MacDiarmid, MacDiarmid; Pare Lorentz. All poets included in A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, 1939 Ed. Selden Rodman.

Jacquelyn Shah. A.B., M.A., M.F.A. & Ph.D.––English/creative writing. Publications: poetry chapbook, small fry; full-length poetry book, What to Do with Red; poems in journals. In 2023 her memoir Limited Engagement: A Way of Living was published, and she was a Pushcart Prize nominee for Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor.

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.