Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0501201049580.2532@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Poems by others: James Wright, "A Lament for the Martyrs" (fwd)
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 10:50:04 -0500 (EST)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:41:59 -0500 From: Halvard Johnson <halvard@earthlink.net> To: "Johnson, Halvard" <halvard@earthlink.net> Subject: Poems by others: James Wright, "A Lament for the Martyrs" A Lament for the Martyrs I am sitting in an outdoor cafe across the street from the Coliseum. The noon is so brilliant that I have to wear my dark glasses. You would think a Roman noon could lay even the Coliseum wide open. But darknesses still foul the place and its hateful grandeur. The Roman Chamber of Commerce and Betelgueze in combine could gut the Coliseum by day or by night till the ghost of Mussolini and the ghost of God turned blue in the face, and light wouldn't mean a thing in that darkness. Cities are times of day. Once Rome was noon. Do you get me? To take a slow lazy walk with Quintus Horatius Flaccus at four o'clock in the night was to become light. If you don't believe me, I offer you a method of scientific verification. I lay you eight to five that you will go blind if you take a walk at high noon with the President of the United States. I love my country for it's light. I love Rome because Horace lived there. I am afraid of the dark. I am game to live with intelligent sinners. Sometimes these days the Romans say that whatever the Barbarians left behind was later sacked and raped by the Barberinis, the noble family who needed the remnant marble for their country palaces. I find them fair enough for me. When I was a boy, the mayors of five towns in the Ohio River Valley solved the practical problems of prohibition by picking the purest and most perfect bootlegger between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to become Chairman of the Committee for Liquor Control. I think it would be wicked for me to wonder what the five mayors did with their cut in private. All I know is that within a year after Milber s public appointment to a legal office, a symphony orchestra mysteriously appeared in one town, two spacious football stadiums appeared in two other towns, the madame of the cathouse in Wheeling was appointed a dollar-a-year man by the Federal Government, and I lost an essay-contest whose subject was the life and work of William Dean Howells, an American author who was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, for Christ's sake, and whose books I had never even heard of, much less read. (As I look back over the shadows of the years, I confess that I have read one of his novels. I like him. He was a good friend of Mark Twain.) But right now the Roman noon is so brilliant that it hurts my eyes. ! I sip my cappuchino at a wobbly sidewalk table and ponder the antiquities of my own childhood: the beautiful river, that black ditch of horror; and the streetcars. Where have they gone now, with their wicker seats that seemed to rattle behind the dull headlights in the slow dusk, in summer where everything in Ohio ran down and yet never quite stopped? Now, the Romans and the discovered Americans stroll blinded in the Coliseum, deaf to the shadows the place never loses, even at noon in Rome, that was for a little while one of the few noons. Some archaeologist gouged out the smooth dust floor of the Coliseum to make it clean. The floor now is a careful revelation. It is an intricate and intelligent series of ditches, and the sun cannot reach them. They are the shadows of starved people who did not even want to die. They were not even Jews. There is no way to get rid of the shadows of human beings who could find God only in that last welcome of the creation, the maws of tortured animals. Is that last best surest way to heaven the throat of the hungry? If it is, God is very beautiful, if not very bright. Who are the hungry? What color is a hungry shadow? Even the noon sunlight in the Coliseum is the golden shadow of a starved lion, the most beautiful of God's creatures except maybe horses. --James Wright in *Unmuzzled Ox*, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1976 Hal Halvard Johnson =============== email: halvard@earthlink.net website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/