MICHAEL ROTHENBERG - Featured Poet

SERENITY SPRING

One day the story changed

And those people who want to help out

They’re incompetent. All of them!

Breeding little dogs to carry around

In a purse. A conspiracy of blue jays

Indecipherable spider webs

Surveillance in every corner of the forest

You can only imagine

What the clouds say

Suspicious signals from the sun

A revolt of hurricanes!

                        *

“What have we done to the earth?”

            For years Industry told us

            About “Better living through chemistry”

            And now that we don’t like what Industry

            does we pretend they never said it

Listen to squirrel chatter

Militant moles message underground

Agitate the atmosphere

Until there’s nothing left of hope

                    (Only holes and shelled nuts)

            Fracking, fracking, fracking, cracking

The Great American Optimism!

Corporate Venture Cyclops!

                        *

            There is no peace

            The Buddha

            Buried

            Buried and unearthed

           

            Buried and unearthed

            Ashes to ashes

            Vanity to vanity

                                    Greetings Serenity!

                        *

I spoke to myself on the deck last night

We reconciled beneath the stars

Waltzed to a raccoon love song

While all the fools in paradise watched

Today the silent sun grows

And burns and burns

I remember pink towels on the garden chair

My mother’s cool gardenia hand

On my fevered head. A difficult breath

Still hidden in the leaves . . .

                        *

There are two worlds I know

The one I run from and the one I hold on to

For dear life. I don’t own either

Beware of the purple doppelganger!

Serenity loiters in fern hollow . . .

So I watch the red geraniums grow

And help them along the best I can

Sweet Serenity Spring.

First published in Wake Up and Dream (MadHat Press, 2017)

Bio:

Michael Rothenberg is editor of BigBridge.org and co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. His most recent books of poetry include Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press, 2016) and Wake Up and Dream (MadHat Press, 2017). A bi-lingual edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story is due out from Varasek Ediciones, Madrid, Spain in Fall 2017.  He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.