The New Ozymandias

The muse visited as I was trying to sleep. I had little to do with it. It is.

 2/5/2017

The New Ozymandias

by Nancy A. Bekofske

Mr President, turn away from Twitter. Turn off the news.

Call your wife. Ask how her day was. Ask if she is lonely.

Rouse your son from his sleep. Imagine his cherubic, solemn face.

Tell him you love him.

Tell him you are working to make the world better, for him.

Imagine his pride when he tells his grandchildren.

They will board the yacht and sail over salt water.

They will go up the streets of New York to Trump Tower

and marvel. Can such greatness be forgotten?

The tower will rise from the sea into clear air.

The gulls will soar and dip overhead in the sun.

Once, he will tell them, we lived here.

Once, he will say, there were streets filled with yellow cars

and people walking with somewhere to go

with work and love and mystery intertwined in their hearts.

They will sail back to land, pondering these things.

Why did the sea come, grandfather, they will inquire.

Their childish voices will float in the wind like ashes.

He will not answer.

How can a man explain?

Call your son, Mr. President.

A Year With The Fairies: Lady Summer, The Fairies' Serenade, and The Fairies' Graphophone

Lady Summer
Summer is a countess fair
Clothed in shimmering sheen,
Rosy footsteps everywhere
Show where she has been.

The glinting sun, the freshening showers,
The bird and honey bee,
The wealth of foliage and flowers
Show her supremacy.

The Fairies' Serenade
In the mystic hour of night
When the moon is gleaming bright
And little ones in Dreamland play,
The Fairies sing their sweetest lay.

Like a climbing rose they go
To your window, in a row,
And on a nodding rose they sing.
While to and fro they swing and swing.

The Fairies' Graphophone
The Fairies all wanted a graphophone,
So they used for a sounding horn
The bell of a blue morning-glory,
For a needle, a rose's thorn.

Then they put a nasturtium leaf
On an acorn cup for a disk,
And the music that comes from that graphophone--

No wonder they frolic and frisk.

from A Year With the Fairies by Anna M. Scott, 1914

+++++

What was a Graphophone? I had heard of a gramophone and the  phonograph; we own an Edison Disc Player and a Victrola from before 1920.

I learned that the Edison phonograph (1877) used tin foil as the recording medium, and the graphophone (1880) used wax. In the 1890s the gramophone using hard disk recordings allowed mas production. The company that produced the Graphophone became Columbia Records. The name Graphophone continued into the 1930s.

In 1906 the Victrola with the 'talking horn' changed the industry and recording machines became known as Victrolas.

To learn more about graphophones and the history of recording machines check out these websites:

• http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/phono_technology1.php
• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlgramo.html
• http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/145959/Media-Today-Chapter-10-The-Recording-Industry/#vars!date=1898-05-01_08:17:33!

April in "A Year With the Fairies"

The Gardeners

When April comes with sun and showers
The Pixies plant a million flowers;
Each Pixie brings his little spade
And digs and delves in vale and glade.

The whole day long he spades and weeds
And gives to Earth his little seeds,
And begs from April sun and showers
Til little seeds grow into flowers.












April Wakes the Flowers

April clad in crystal rain-drops
Danced across the sunny skies,
Found Earth's children still lay sleeping,
Yearned once more to see their eyes.

So she pelted them with rain-drops,
Sprinkled them with soft warm showers,
Till the pattering of her crystals
Waked the sleep, smiling flowers.












from A Year With the Fairies, by Anna M. Scott, illustrations by M. T. Ross
1914, P. F. Volland & Co,

9-11

9-11. Four characters. That is all one has to say and we understand  everything.

I know that each generation has an event that changed everything. Or weeks or months or years which changed everything. Pearl Harbor. Fort Sumter. The Nazi invasion of one's home town in Europe. Hiroshima. The Titanic. The Lusitania. The Maine. Pogroms. The Influenza Epidemic. The scalping of an entire family. The Concentration Camp. The Internment Camp. The Refugee Camp. Ethnic Cleansing. There is no end to these horrors that stretch back beyond written history or even oral tradition. The Day That Changed The World.

And children do pick up on the fear. I remember the Cuban Missal Crisis, not because I watched the news or understood anything about Russia or politics, but because I remember coming downstairs from my afternoon nap to find the unusual sight of my parents watching television during the daytime. And they were worried about something. I had never before seen my dad scared. I was made aware that the world had its horrors and that my parents could be powerless to protect me.

I wrote a number of poems on 9-12. They are called The Day That Changed The World. This one is a response to fear. I have not edited or rewritten these poems. They just are.

What We Imagine

Nancy A. Bekofske

Our child is in the white hospital.

There are tubes and alien machines surrounding him.

We watch and wait.

There is red blood, vivid on the white

Like a beautiful rose.

No, our child is playing with friends.

There is coughing.

There is headache.

Our child goes to bed.

Our child breaks out in death.

No, our child is in the school room

There is a blinding light,

Wisdom is not so enlightening as this light.

There is a flash of heat.

There is ash.

  

No, our child is called.

Our child bravely leaves his only home

His only family.

Our child is trained to kill.

Our child falls, he thinks of home, He thinks no more.

No, our child wakes up in the morning.

Our child sees the rain.

Our child remembers the old life,

The days before fear.

Our child awakes in the morning.

Our child imagines

There is no one to protect him.