David X Novak
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On the Death of a Young Bassist

3/26/2018

 

Heavenly Father, not alone
    Young Draylen Mason died,
And can the murderer atone
        Before thy throne
For his obnoxious pride?

I pray that Draylen rest in peace
    And with the angels play,
In thy celestial companies
        His tones release
    Love’s spirit all the way.

The Merciless Monied Mercers

3/24/2018

 

Diana, Bob, Rebekah,
    The Mercers with their guns,
Have built an Owl’s Nest Mecca
    For goons and freaks at once.

Down on the unsuspecting
    They make their silent swoop,
Rank criminals electing,
    Then leave behind their poop.

It’s for the love of money
    They do the things they do,
But evil isn’t funny
    Nor their blood ever blue.

Rebekah, Bob, Diana,
    Destroy all what they touch,
And banish truth to China,
    By their right-winger putsch.

It is an awesome triad,
    America’s nemesis,
But watching freedom die had
    For them a kind of bliss.

Fifteen Years After (the Invasion of Iraq)

3/20/2018

 
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Apparently yesterday fifteen years ago the US-led attack on Iraq began. Who was following? Abroad, only Tony Blair (though others may have been browbeaten into various levels of support). At home, it seemed as though practically everyone, or at least folks weren’t concerned and certainly not making a stink about it. Sean Penn spoke against it, because he wanted to know, Iraqi blood soon to be on his hands as an American citizen, what the face and faces of those about to be attacked looked like. I wrote about my efforts to stage a play in Chicago in opposition to the overwhelming trend of approbation for the military action, but failed (not to mention approaching one or two out-of-city theater companies), intending the essay as a prefatory introduction to that play if ever it gets published.
​
​Before the bombs fell in a campaign intended to “shock and awe” its recipients, I had completed a book of poems about the business, not “washing my hands of it” (it impossible to do so) but voicing a dissident note; joined, after the bombs fell, by clusters of American citizens here and there who were persistent in showing up to events with “Stop the War” signs and making their views known. (It is not that there was no protest in advance of the campaign, but hardly of a density to make itself felt; and even those who blocked Lake Shore Drive that first evening did not make an impression against the ubiquitous propaganda.)

During the course of the war (if indeed that is the proper terminology for a military movement essentially in one direction), from time to time I posted poems online primarily as a means to vent outrage. These (or at least such of these as I managed to gather) were later assembled into a book of their own, the introduction to which is here. It goes without saying that after the apparent terrorist demolition of the World Trade Center and affiliated attacks, I had issued a book which argued for a peaceful response, not a bellicose one. However a deliberate effort by politicians riled up the populace, and it was that constant process that built up the wellspring of support for the campaign against Iraq, although Iraq had not been a party to those attacks.

​With the fifteenth anniversary come and now gone, I realize that has been the major event of my life, if not in all aspects equally certainly in the writing of poetry, which till not long ago had played a dominant part.

Some Thoughts on Lines of Mourning

3/18/2018

 
After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting I wrote this poem. It is the opening poem in my 2014 book The Rip of Gales. I have not “covered” subsequent (or other) “mass shooting events.” The subject is too hard to broach.

The plenitude of deaths, and especially deaths by violent means and deaths by murder, makes me say, with T.S. Eliot, “I should be glad of another death.”

My spirit continues to mourn Marielle Franco, who died by apparent assassination five days ago. I did not know her, but the continuing tributes pour in on social media. My sympathetic poem feels hardly adequate; but it would break me to revisit.

I just looked at the lines I wrote upon occasion of Daniel Pearl’s murder. He was but one year younger than me; there were some similarities in background, about which I wrote somewhere (mainly that we both had a journalism class in high school), and so I felt a kinship of sorts. The news cycle churns up other “events,” my life has continued, and I can’t understand why I have had some 15+ years beyond his allotment. There is no sense to it. (Beyond the obvious that poets tend to lead secluded, sedentary lives, comparatively speaking.)

Students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting in Parkland, Florida, (along with other survivors and bereaved) have been agitating for changes in gun laws. We old cannot but look with admiration on the young, on these young.

Look Within (a sonnet by Claude McKay)

3/17/2018

 

Lord, let me not be silent while we fight
    In Europe Germans, Asia Japanese
For setting up a Fascist way of might
    While fifteen million Negroes on their knees
Pray for salvation from the Fascist yoke
    Of these United States. Remove the beam
(Nearly two thousand years since Jesus spoke)
    From your own eyes before the mote you deem
It proper from your neighbor’s to extract!
    We bathe our lies in vapors of sweet myrrh,
And close our eyes not to perceive the fact!
    But Jesus said: You whited sepulcher,
Pretending to be uncorrupt of sin,
    While worm-infested, rotten through within!

In Memoriam Marielle Franco, 27 July 1979 - 14 March 2018

3/15/2018

 
Quantos mais vão precisar morrer para que essa guerra acabe?
Heavenly Father, please relieve my mind
Against this wickedness of humankind,
That will oppress, and shoring the oppression
Shy not from deeds abominable, aggression
Against those who protest and who fight back,
Nor shun 
no means in boldness of attack.

Teach me, O Lord, to extirpate the worm
That dwells within the heart, and delves long term,
As makes a man, in service of a cause,
Content to abrogate civilian laws,
Committing foul trespass against another
As ought to be his sister and his brother.

Assassination brings an end to things,
Yet let not hope be shorn its angel’s wings,
Even as victims may be martyrs made
When basic decency lies killed betrayed
By treacherous human action past the pale:
Though loved ones die, yet love can never fail.

Lord, Marielle Franco has been killed,
A voice that called for justice rudely stilled,
Yet let us be deterred not by this murder,
Loudly broadcasting wide that we have heard her,
And that “we are together” in this fray,
Even in such words as we heard her say.

The ancient sin, as though a tapeworm in
The body politic, with us has been
Even since slaves were brought across the seas
To give their lives and labor—a disease
From plunderous days, and even days before
When men sought to acquire ill gains by war.

As Marielle Franco now ascends
In spirit to eternity, her friends
And family bereaved, must wet the earth
With salty tears of which there is no dearth,
And carry her to heaven on their sighs
Such as ensue when a good person dies.

We who survive, must dedicate ourselves
To extirpating the vile worm that delves
Like an iniquity that cankers love,
And say, of murder we have had enough,
Adding, in no small voice, that at love’s core
We treasure those same things that she stood for.

All the oppression man has done to man
We must revoke, renouncing as we can,
Even denouncing the atrocious means
(As justice dies in sanguinary scenes)
Of violently exploiting man or beast— 
Even the greatest of us is the least.

She goes, and we retain in memory
An inspiration, how to live as free
And strenuously give voice to what is right
Even though we be martyred in the night
Like Marielle Franco, now deceased,
In legacy of her strong faith increased.

For Richard

3/4/2018

 

Dear friend, although I scarcely knew thee well,
I hear that thou hast met that reaper fell
As makes men brethren in his scythe's cruel sweep,
Even as for thee—for myself—I weep;

Weep less because the premonition of
Mine own portending doom, than unmet love,
Philia, as may be in passing shared,
Even as vain ambitions seldom spared.

For what is death, but poets' kin and kith?
What we ourselves, but weavers of a myth
That time must rend anon? We surely go,
And lose in passing all that we may know.

Yours was a poet's soul, if not in deed
In aspiration, its vibration keyed
To all the finer trappings of our journey;
Yet my words plead no case, I no attorney.

Heaven—if there be heaven—opens wide
Its gates to one whose spirit never died
As even by my witness I attest
Now that thy vacant body lies in rest.

Farewell, dear friend, save in my memory,
And in the hearts bereaved now grieving thee:
Though thou departest, with us yet remains
Love's blessing, compensation for these pains.

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