|
Sanford Goldstein
festival
for the three-day return
of Japanese long dead
how my friend piles food on my plate
as if it was my last supper
I cannot say
there's an inner world
of hill and cloud
the thin string I dragged along
spilled out through four decades
the Christ
that came to rescue
all mankind,
ah, Rouault, I look and find
how parallel your Saviour's eyes
in her poems
(the poet's precious mother
gone not too long ago)
these five-liners tell us
of darkness swallowed
again
an all-night
insomnia
the world turns
into a gray gutter
my granddaughter
passing out Jews for Jesus
handbills—
God, she says, protected her
from an angry subway woman
I never
called those long Zen years
a nightmare
only in midnight thoughts did
the master's stick flail my back
trying to imitate
my e-mail pal's surrealist
poem,
I end up jabbing my eye
with a pink flower from Mars
again
I walk that narrow road
to the north
sad, is it not? that Basho's
gay mate refused to go along
Sanford Goldstein's tanka collections, six in all, reappear in his recently published Four Decades on My Tanka Road, MET, 2007.
|
