[Jeffrey]

Bubastic

I begged you to send me poems,
but logic was your gift,
and soon I saw there was no break,
no chasm there, no rift.

So A was A, a vista spread
from Gihon to the Hao:
all corners of a starpoint world,
all feelings here and now.

A thousand ghosts on Gilman Street;
Dagger City reaches dawn:
the brass has rusted, the strings have snapped
yet all bid the band play on

with quotes whispered from Virgil's tales,
and Rumi's fevered dream,
marching from the ivory gate,
to be, perceived, to seem.

And I wept when the White Ship passed,
and roared when Roma burned,
until I had no songs to sing,
all my notation learned.

And Troy was ash when I awoke;
I cursed all gods and fates
except the One Who came your way
and slept within your gates.

You found me within the marshland;
I saw you on a shelf,
minted for the collector's game,
the Nile Queen herself,

who watched when old Ausare fell,
when Ramses sped to war,
when Moshe learned to carve the clay,
and Latin washed ashore.

But when He came, He brought a spring
to compensate their loss,
while brigands took His very shoes,
and a place beside His Cross.

Will you bid me to die for you
when the Nine Bows come to play,
or will you beg for one last verse
set against the waning day?

I was Homer to your Helen,
another fool for you,
whose name the worm will surely claim,
Gottfried or 白面具.

But Troy is ash and I but dirt
set upon honest weights,
valued by One Who came your way
and slept within your gates.



* 1) 白面具 (bai mian ju); 2) an extended allusion that folks outside of the Middle East might miss in this poem is the Coptic tradition that Christ and His parents stayed briefly in the city of Bubastis, and had several foreshadowing experiences there.

[Skeeter]

I think I'll return to this one and attempt to scan it a bit later on, but I just wanted to point out what looks like a typo in the third line. Seems to be a stray "was."

[Jeffrey]

Originally Posted by Skeeter

I think I'll return to this one and attempt to scan it a bit later on, but I just wanted to point out what looks like a typo in the third line. Seems to be a stray "was."

Maybe it was palindromic with "saw" (hint: it was not).