Poetry
Some poetry excerpts from Dr.Goodman's book,After The War, and other writings.
After the War
My father stood before the bathroom glass,
Lathering a sweet soap on a soldier's chin.
But things he said to his embattled face
I had not heard and would not hear again.
The war, for years, had split his lonely mind,
His mind his heart in terms I would rejoin,
By telling well the tragic tale told me,
A Coleridge's Mariner...
[Excerpt from the poem "After the War."]
Abel
to the memory of John Finlay
My brother Cain, a slave in sweating fields,
Is tilling in late summer's burn and silt,
Rotating crops the demon, nature, yields,
To pastoral brows that burn the god of guilt.
Eve suffers him. Resembling tracks of crow,
Her dusty eyes are dry. They cannot weep.
For, stoical, she meditates Cain's brow,
And every night she sees me killed in sleep.
Teh Bedouins that raid our water holes
Sex where cypresses hold the Devil's heat,
While nomads barter guilt for sterile foals
That, south of Eden, defecate Cain's street,
Seth's hairy tribes come by. They wash Cain's name
With clotted souls and filial blood they shame.
At My Mother's Grave
who died of leukemia in 1963
This grainy rock,
Now bright and clean,
Tremor or shock,
May one day lean.
It stands above
The body's wear,
Holding the grieved
Back from despair.
It will not find
The warp of stone
To maim the mind
As cancer bone.
Love will accept
Things as they are,
The least adept,
The funeral car,
For it knows how
Things ought to be,
Sycophant bow,
Or sensual spree.
The Ghost Town of Madrid, New Mexico
In autumn cold, a twister draws
The eye across a ghostly scene.
The grasses shimmer, tough and lean,
By thistle and the husks of straw.
A windy tipple is unmanned,
The station buffets tumbleweed,
And dust is on the autumn seed,
Twisting across the dusty sand.
Is death therefore the emptiness
Of vacant hours that never cease
And never change, but to release
Us from the failures of the will?
Is being lost in nothingness,
And time but motion in the mind,
When death divides, as species kind,
Our substansces from presentness?
Lately old Hippies, high and stern
As Pentitents, have settled in.
Idealists, too, I have to grin
At one who dances with a fern,
And dancing courts the winds of love,
For things are seldom what they seem,
He sings, substantial as a dream,
Singing of peace, the spectral dove,
And one John baptized in the stream.
