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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Far Travels HOWARD GOFREED ________________________ Karma You watched the bald brown man in saffron yellow flame, calmly seated, cross-legged, eyes flared out to sockets, fire-licked lips burned back to a grin no Buddha ever wore, ever saw, bones hissed and sap sizzled from martyrdom smoky as a smudge pot. You saw the fiery skull collapse, stiff spine fall like gutted tenements, reduced to ash and black stain on the boulevard, even the heart burned off. Could you foretell that day when you'd crawl, terrified and armed, over that spot, over that spot on Tet? [393]
Nearing 49 49 is 50 minus 1 and 7 times 7 a perfect square so appropriate to middle age but my father's father was 21 when he reached it and the bible says it's 35 and if it turns out to be 45 in the end you'll be a wizened old raisin Mozart was a teenager when he passed it unawares and what we always ask would he have done if he'd lived longer and then what of Beethoven and the history of music The oldest American is 126 and credits long life to abstinence from sex the past 56 years so 49 is not so old you and your culture say and if love takes longer (and seems better) be glad you haven't reached the age of abstinence and anyway who among the living knows exactly when the wave crests or how long he can ride it [394]
Parable In Jerusalem a wall tumbles down the wall of a cemetery tumbles down the weight of ages—mud bone and gravestones—tumbles down through the roof of the Paradise Garden Café and fanatical Jews feel it retribution against people who do not belong and fanatical Muslims feel it a call to expel people who do not belong and Western newspaper readers throw up hands whispering What can be done? smug in their not belonging Arabs and Israelis scrabble through mud bone and markers to rescue the recently dead for burial in other graveyards where walls tumble down tumble down in Jerusalem [395]
Howard Gofreed is an information systems application designer and project manager for an international conglomerate of retail grocery and pharmacy chains. His poetry has appeared in Negative Capability, The MacGuffin, Lip Service and WordWrights!; and in Washington, DC area poetry anthologies, including Cabin Fever (WordWorks, 2004). He received a Jenny McKean Moore poetry scholarship at the George Washington University, and was a member of the Folger Shakespeare Library's Poetry Committee, and a final judge of the Washington Prize and the Milton Poetry Prize. He obtained his J.D. from the University of Maryland in 1973. |
