Intellectuals

Intellectual? Take your club
And that your principles cohere
Beat all about you, grown and child,
Until your brave new world appear.
        Make no bones.

Perhaps your donnée’s so profond
That even French penseurs are glazed,
No matter, praxis remakes fact
And whole societies are razed.
        Make no bones.

And not a stone is left unturned:
That one percent minorities –
Men in ballgowns! – should glide on top
All must attend reformatories.
        Make no bones.

But there’s a caravanserai
Lumbering through the city square
With black-print book and desert cries
Will throttle all the thinkers there.
        Make no bones.

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© December 2015

Magnolia Tree: November

The common rhyme in line 5 of each stanza binds the stanzas together, I hope.

   I wrote a previous poem about this magnificent magnolia tree in April 2015, posted here on 2 September 2019. Here's a link.

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   In mild November’s balmy air,
   The morning sun an orange flare,
I saw that tree and shrub had dropped their leaves
And bare and bony starkly stood resigned
   Waiting for winter’s rattling blast,
Except a squat magnolia tree, reclined
Against a fence, which like a field in sheaves
   Was stooked with buds as if harvest done
   And not the great fast scarce begun.

   Those buds, a finger-joint in length,
   And bulky in their dog’s-tooth strength,
Like sandstone votives thick upon a shrine,
Olive-yellowed and statements of intent,
   Crouched braced for what the snows might cast,
For set so soon, three months of frost and vent
Would smother them before, a breaching mine,
   Vesuvius-like they’d incandesce
   And spring and lust in flowers confess.

   But what of us in thin-boned age
   Who heart and rasping lungs assuage,
With time, loose-endedly, to mark this tree,
Will we escape the granite months’ compress,
   Come spring to glow like meadows grassed,
Or like the balding tree’s last brittle tress
Of leaves, will we in wizened agony
   Fall to the roots to rot in wet
   That these great buds bright blooms beget?

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© December 2015