SONG TO ANOTHER CAROLYN

 

I

            Say, “To mend this world is [her] religion”

                        (to paraphrase Great Penn),

                        to praise and pray to l’ange humain,

            when like Zola she gazes on the Stygian,

            when like Gorky plumbs The Lower Depths,

                        nonetheless to raise a gaude

            to wealth of life and good embodied,

though greed has done the dirty, and poverty has wept.

 

II

Not the artist’s job, to juice you like a fruit,

                        squeezing tears with happenings

billed as, “powerful, compelling, dissolute.”

 

Tragedy is fated, given men and things;

                        so should be the odd reprieve.

Old Man Bean, expiring with his sentence, wrings

 

out breaths without the drug that in prison he received.

                        Schools said to help Little Girl Bean

take her shining genius for deficiency.

 

But starving Baby Bean skips her sad death scene,

                        laughing as pathos succumbs to sense.

Mom discovers food banks; so, the gods intervene.

 

                                                III

            And what of Asphalt Man, whose work it is

                                    to tar the landscape over?

            His suit and tie, his hair, his eyes,

                                    his thoughts are asphalt-colored.

 

            A tempting target, with his new-built villa,

                                    but who would stoop to fire?

            His bride is paralyzed. Was he the driver?

Somehow he must pay: anxious, bumbling, mired.

 

IV

                        Honest and honorable author,

                        make rich and poor kindred, show at a glance

                        all suffer from that which makes man suffer;

serve truth, triumphant enemy of time and chance.