To Orin,
and to Adam, Rob, Marshall
On the Occasion of the Debut of
The Rag and Bone Shop Poetry Theater
February 20, 2010
at
The Other Side of Utica

Over the rising beer-fueled din
In the bar we love,
After your reading,
A friend told us where he’d been that night -
A concert at the Aud with 2 remaining Dead.
The Grateful Dead! Rivals to Yeats’ poems
While your doughty cast surprised us,
In the tiny theater dedicated to Her - the Muse -
And to all who’d be so unsavvy, so punily destined
As to follow Her in this town so bloody far from Hollywood,
In this butthole kind of place,
Irishly unwanted -
As distant from “the real” on TV screen
As real stench to its description,
As my real heart to Valentine trinkets
Arrayed in bright discounted piles at RiteAid,
As a man - 61 and steeped in that Sixties ecstatic stew -
Getting up first time to read on stage -
Stage-scared, his customary persona fled -
to the icon Yeats, his poems today unread.

I cannot imagine how ridiculous the world
handed down must seem to our young -
Its mockery of heroism, its erase of humble men and women bent on
Virtue, kindness, honor to the gods whose traces
Linger, though not encouraged, in every human breast -
Where Holocaust survivors and Tiger Woods parade
Before us in celebrity, as though knowledge were value-free,
Accrued in our poor besieged brains by electronic grace.

Can such a world even behold
Acts done purely for devotion’s sake,
Out of love for Her and for those few who in their age
lent Her their voice?
Muse, Great Mother, Goddess:
All names for the One in whose orchard we must
Learn to walk.
In each incredibly humble bite
Of her apple,
Using voice and body and word,
The truth -
Like food for the starving in Port-au-Prince -
Leaks through
Barriers of blindness allied with greed:
All souls of equal worth!
And fight we must to bring each one -
My child, and yours; none purely welcomed -
To manger birth.