Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem,
Wednesday, 12 September 2001
Alas, my buddy Herb has got the blues,
My poor old buddy Herb's deep in the blues.
But it's an exercise, it's not the news
That's got him in the dumps. It's not the dust
That's covered New York City deep in dust
And rubble -- no, it's not the boom and bust
Of terror from the skies on a summer day,
A brilliant, clear and sunny summer day
Buried in suffocating clouds of gray
Smoke and soot and scattered body parts
Of once whole people merely body parts
That now must be removed in trucks and carts
From the streets of Old New York. Our world is changed
Forever now by monsters, forever changed,
And we who live in it have been estranged
From what was real. The solid earth we knew,
That solid sod that once we walked and knew
Is now surreal -- planes dropping from the blue
Into towers falling onto streets
That are no longer avenues and streets
But silent canyons. Herb, this form repeats,
This form called blues, but so too does despair,
These images of death and of despair
That sunder us beyond hope of repair.
From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; AMAZON.COM .
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