"Last Year in Jerusalem"
I found a single stanza in my 'maybe later' documents and pimped it a bit
Hungering for Jerusalem
I flew El Al to Israel.
The smells of Yemenite cuisine
Eaten at Falafel Hateimani
Just past the Ethiopian Embassy near
The Street of the Prophets [Rehov Hanevi'im]
Where Holman Hunt who painted “The Scapegoat”
Built a house - number 64
And delicious pitta dipped in baba ganoush
From a pavement cafe on the Arab side
Haunt my nostrils still.
After lunching on olives and hummus
And a sweet potato and prune tagine
And a glass too many of Goldstar
At a café in the shade of Gehenna
I ambled the apartment canyons of Givat Oranim
Alternating, "Salaam alaikum...Shalom...Good day..."
At random strangers avoiding my eye.
No blame: a midday Englishman
Heavy under the influence
Was safer kept pariah.
A caterwaul of police whistles
Encouraged my shamble
As I stumbled the intersection
To the Valley of Gazelles
Where I rested my length
Sprawled on a sun bleached bench.
The animals are there, but rarely seen
I glimpsed a slender female
Camouflaged in her coat,
White and opaque couché,
Grazing a thicket of thorns.
I looked into her eyes
Deep into her eyes
She looked away shyly
A look not unfamiliar to me.
And I knew… that I knew…that
I knew that creature.
I had loved her a lifetime before,
When she was a girl.
Rick Gammon
Thu 27th Oct 2016 23:47
These poems are never finished - I performed some this evening - very familiar ones to me too - yet made quite significant changes while waiting to go on.
Ezra Pound advocated poems being written and then re-looked at after 5 years once they had settled.?
It might well be a crime of aesthetic assault and battery to foist first drafts on readers and expect praise for slip shod work.
It can take 5 minutes to write out a burst of 'poetry' but that's when the hard work begins and words and lines and stanzas battle to keep their place while others battle for entrance into the work.
It can be quite some scrap - blood on the dance floor ?
p.s. I've spent a whole week plus trying to connect with a poem about my step father - it is like knitting snow - I've enough words down to fill half a dozen works of my kind of poetry but still cannot 'get' him.
Why did we ever start out trying to write poetry? It's the simplest of art forms yet the most fiendishly difficult :)