For B.L., again
Bemused
By my anhedonic scowl,
Bruce, down at the tennis courts,
Challenged me:
Poeticize the therapeutic title here supplied.
Face it! I am, indeed, lucky!
First, my parents left Poland
Long before the Nazi onslaught.
Thus, luckily, we escaped
The furnaces of Auschwitz,
Unlike six million others.
And they chose America!
They could have,
As many others did,
Opted for the Argentine,
Where my own left-wing
Leanings might well have
Culminated
In a drugged free-fall
From a soaring plane
To join the other countless
Disappeared.
My 1930 birth
Enhanced the luck
That shielded me.
I slipped, undrafted and unscathed,
Through all the major
Wars that marked my century,
Though twenty million others
Were less fortunate.
That same luck held
As I matured—
Healthy kids, job markets
Opening just in time.
McCarthyism, to be sure,
Was troublesome,
But didn’t injure me—
Never mind the loyalty oath
I had to sign
Before I met my first class.
I watched as Africa
Joyously escaped its masters,
Watched as liberators
Morphed to kleptocrats,
As Hutus, in one hundred days,
Murdered one million Tutsis,
As blood diamonds justified
A holocaust,
As Darfur melted in flames,
As Zimbabwe perished,
As Congolese combatants
Without discrimination,
Raped, pillaged
Everywhere.
I watched as religion
Promised paradise
To those who killed the infidel.
And here,
In god-blessed America,
I watched,
As the richest among us,
Blessed with an abundance
Impossible to spend,
Devised poisonous
New instruments
(To serve a greed
Grown pathological)
That broke the world’s
Thin spine.
But not mine!
My luck has made me comfortable,
A sturdy skiff
Adrift upon a howling sea
Of misery,
Murderous waves,
As far as I can see.
Ah, lucky me!
(11/13/08)