Dedicated to the GAFB/HiPockets/Poppy Star reunion 2010, with love to all, Amers
WITH ABANDON
Abandon hangups
all ye who enter here
Abandon your present
your what-happened-since-then
Embrace the ever-present past
Pick up a tambourine
Beat it til your hands bruise
Sing til it hurts
Play til your fingers remember
where their callouses were
Laugh til you cry
Live like it’s your last day on earth
Like it’s the end of your shift
Grab a cold beer, flop down here
and tell me all about it
We remain gypsies
no matter what path we chose
The world will never see anything like it again
Time and place
Ribs and space
Perrrrrrfection
Amy Barlow Liberatore
Santa Monica, August 15, 2010 (the morning after)
We were asked to write about winter or cold. Poets went from temperatures to coldness of heart to…
COLD AS A SWASTIKA
And when they had gathered all the books
Works of Jewish and other subversive writers
Thoughts of Einstein
Dark musings of playwright Bertolt Brecht
(every time you hum “Mack the Knife,” remember him)
Lenin, Trotsky, Zola (politics)
From Sigmund Freud to Ernest Hemingway
Ironically, Jack London’s Arctic went into the pile
And then the pyre – everyone pulled out matches to participate in
a funeral worthy of a ship-bound Viking
The death of thousands of words
too dangerous to read
Thoughts polluting the minds of
pure-blooded, ‘real’ Germans
The chill pored over intellectuals
Jews and Christians alike
Frozen in time, these works
Alive elsewhere, but here during the Nazi regime
forbidden fruit
Icewater veins of torch-wielding youth
who, had they read the books
might have understood what was going wrong
Here, in America
that same icy atmosphere prevails
over “Harry Potter”
over “Huck Finn”
over “Catcher in the Rye”
We don’t burn ’em; we ban ’em
And the North wind keeps on blowing
© 2010 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Sharp Little Pencil 