POEMS FROM LAW SCHOOL
In 1990 I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin Law School, and graduated with honors in 1993. The experience was undoubtedly instructive and produced, among other things, a number of poems. These are given below in chronological order, followed by some that were written after 1993 but that still reflect this experience or touch on the theme of law. The central poem of this website, "The Hexagon," could also be included here. Written midway through my last year in law school, it expresses an alternate vision of law as well as of the poetic vocation.
Esther Cameron
PROPERTY
High in the economy the naked dice
in the dead hand roll our fortunes, constellate
our wills. Or so you say, and legislate
thereby against my call to the One Choice,
or so it seems. And yet there is no price
on that which no one covets: the estate
of talismans and tokens, cast by fates
obscure beyond the workings of the bourse.
Like, there's this old house in Jerusalem
a friend once dreamed she'd given me. I went
to the neighborhood. Friends there had dreamed I'd come.
Before you'd write an equation for these lines
I could return, with all the world's consent,
and claim that house by eminent domain.
1991
*
FUTURES
The trading goes on:
A computer chip
For the heart of a sparrow.
1991
*
BUSINESS PORTRAIT
Her picture stands on the table top,
And everyone says it is very fine.
The made-up face doesn't show a line,
The tinted hair is well fluffed up,
The tilt of the head seems meant to say,
"Look at me, I'm as shrewd and sharp as any,
Be sure my looks cost a pretty penny,
I'm poised and launched for success -- make way!"
Only the eyes give her away.
They whisper, "This isn't where I belong.
This hairdo, this suit, are wrong, all wrong.
I never was good at overreaching,
And I'm much too tired and sad for the teaching.
Let me walk in the woods, by the shore of the sea,
Like the dreaming girl they once let me be."
1991
*
TO A YOUNG MAN AND A YOUNG WOMAN, SEEN IN THE LAW SCHOOL
I would that all who saw you had these eyes
That watch for beauty and hail it as a sign
Of cosmic order and intent divine,
Of harmony transcending compromise,
And hope the most, where form and feature are
Illumined from within by gifts of mind,
Where conscience and strength appear combined:
Many might wisely follow such a star.
Be always kind, and constant to your word,
Seek unacknowledged worth, make it your own,
Let none who have spoken truth remain alone
While you are there to say that you have heard:
No less is worthy of the gifts you bear,
Nor should Truth be content with guise less fair.
1991
*
POETS IN LAW SCHOOL
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
--Shelley
We take to law because our love has failed.
We study how to sue instead of sing.
We still plead; but our pleadings have a sting:
They're meant not to reach out, but to be hurled.
Farewell, the uncorrupted word that held
In visionary light each common thing,
That fitted symbolism like a ring
Upon the hand of the abandoned world.
Here we avoid each other's eyes in shame,
Learning our lawyer tricks, earning the blame
For half the evils of this addled time.
Wish our congeners could have valued us
When we spoke to them in truth and trust.
They cast out reason, when they turned from rhyme.
1992
(Published in Mad Poets Review and on The Hyper Texts (www.thehypertexts.com)
*
CORPORATE TAXATION
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
-- Noam Chomsky
The corporation's colorless green idea
sleeps furiously through the sections of the code,
as on the futures market mitochondria
logistify a hubbub into outcomes.
While hands of flesh let go their grip, the wires
grope toward each other, programs copulate
in the usurious space, and calculations
mesh to convolute a brain nowhere.
We're the card section. Keep your cards in order,
don't shuffle them, don't show another color
or you might garble our message to the stars.
In plain terms, brother, I do not like what's taking
shape from us; would flash a laser mirror
in anyone's eyes, so as not to be that sight.
1992
*
EPITAPH ON A LANDFILL
Here lies the matter of the universe,
Murdered by mind amuck, which has so made
These lightless forms that they can never fade
And bloom again in the cycle of the years:
The atoms have outwornness like a curse
Indelibly affixed, and now must bide,
Impervious as an evildoer's pride,
Itching and suppurating in the earth.
Here unrots our presumption's mutant fruit,
Death beyond death! Corpses and dung are sweet
As apple blossom in comparison.
You who drive by here, pray we amend
Our works that they return to Earth as friend
And we to the Great Round, the All-in-One.
1992
*
MARITAL AGREEMENTS
When two decide to bind their lives together,
Having no thought except for love alone,
They cannot fear that clouds could ever gather
Between them, or their love to strife be prone.
Love, absolute, commands that voice be dumb
Which cautions that enchantment can take flight
And then estrangement, and then anger come
Which blinds the angered to the other's right.
O Love! be humble in your proudest hour,
Consider that you work in mortal clay;
Secure yourself against the darker power
By contracts that will bind you to fair play
If worst should come to worst. Then many a storm
May lightly blow, knowing it cannot harm.
1992
(published in Wisconsin Lawyer)
*
THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY
All in the dewy morning
On the fourteenth of July
I went to walk beneath the trees
That grow so green and high.
And there I met Tom Jefferson,
He was pacing up and down,
His head was sunk upon his chest,
His face it wore a frown.
"What is the matter, sir," I said,
"Or what is it you seek?"
"I'm looking for the people
With whom I wish to speak."
"What do you mean," I cried in fear,
"I see them all around."
"I see their bodies just like you,
But their spirits are not found.
"They do not hear, they do not see,
They walk with empty eyes."
"I guess you mean the media
That have got them hypnotized.
"Their ears are filled with crashing sound,
Their eyes with flashing lights,
Their minds too full of greed and gore
To sort out truth from lies.
"They have no time to meet and talk
And hear the liberty bell --
It is as if some evil king
Had bound them in a spell."
"Climb up, climb up into that tower,
"And ring that bell once more."
"That bell has got a crack," I replied,
The sound would not go o'er."
"Then you must forge it new," he said,
"In the flame of your desire,
Until they come together
To hear what freedom requires.
"Tell them to keep the Sabbath,
A day when all are free:
That day they must not buy nor sell
Nor sit and watch TV.
"It is a day to meet and talk
And find the ones they trust
To keep their hands from bribery
And on wisdom to insist.
"And these in turn together
Will meet in council high
To write a Constitution
For the coming century.
"For everything wears out at last
And needs to be renewed
Out of the ancient spirit
Of truth and rectitude.
"That spirit has a mighty power,
Although the odds be high;
Will you go and tell the people?"
I said that I would try.
*
LAWYERS NEVER CRY
Well, I was a starving poet not so very long ago,
And I came to law school hoping it would help me make some dough,
But I also hoped that it would help me work for liberty,
But the very day I got here, this is what they said to me:
“Lawyers never cry, they don’t dream at night,
Spend their long days working under fluorescent lights.
If the principles we’re teaching you do not seem very high,
First thing you must learn here is, Lawyers Never Cry.”
There were some who came here thinking they were going to save the trees,
While others spoke of helping women and minorities,
But I saw their dreams grow dimmer as they learned about the game,
And their faces with each passing week looked more and more the same.
They’d found out Lawyers never cry, they don’t dream at night,
Spend their long days working under fluorescent lights.
If your interviewer says to you, “Why did you even try?”
Just keep saying to yourself, Lawyers Never Cry.
When the fall came round we all began to go for interviews,
And they told us very frankly, “This is what we mean to do:
We will pay the winner sixty grand to run a treadmill race,
And if they burn out there’ll be plenty more to take their place.
But you know Lawyers never cry, they don’t dream at night,
Spend their long days working under fluorescent lights.
If your supervising attorney comes on like Captain Bligh,
Grit your teeth and tell yourself, Lawyers Never Cry.”
Well, I used to think the purpose of the law was to define
The rights and wrongs we live by, and to keep the bad in line,
But the view that now prevails is that it’s just a power-tool,
And if you mention right and wrong you’re made to seem a fool.
They’ll tell you Lawyers never cry, they don’t dream at night,
Spend their long days working under fluorescent light.
If you get the blues for justice and your heart is asking why,
Close your eyes and yell out loud, Lawyers Never Cry.
Now come all you lawyers who have time, or who did not get hired,
Or who burnt out or who expressed convictions and got fired:
Grass-roots organization is the job that must be done
Until we have a law again that’s fair to everyone.
Till then let the lawyers cry, let them dream at night,
Let them take long walks and get some fresh air and sunlight,
Let them help the people find out what is going on and why
And how to build a government that won’t make people cry.
I said let the lawyers cry, let them dream at night,
Let them take long walks and get some fresh air and sunlight,
Let them help the people find out what is going on and why
Until we have a government that won’t make people cry.
*
INSTRUCTIONAL VERSES (THE PATH OF SONG)
Those who aspire to the skill of singing
And wish to know how to acquire it
Should bear in mind with joy and reverence
Four things chiefly: the word, the self,
The human other, the cosmic Whole.
First the word: how each word we use
Contains a wealth, a world of meaning.
At every hour watch words in action,
To names above all accord attention,
For the act of naming is half of art.
Read, too, the books of the bards before you,
Watch what they do and how they do it,
At tradition's table listen and learn.
Next, attend to yourself, your soul,
Storehouse of memories, well of dreams,
Wearer of wounds, seeker of healing,
Unending teller of its own tale,
Source of melody beyond experience:
Those who can hear both tale and tune,
To them all things bring signs of guidance.
Then, the others who are to themselves
Storehouses of memories, wells of dreams,
Wearers of wounds, seekers of healing,
Unending tellers of their own tales,
Source of melody beyond experience,
Messengers to you as you to them.
Above all, abhor envy like poison,
For envy blinds the I in the other,
Blots creation with hatred of good.
If envy stings, let its sting alert you
To what you must praise lest your soul perish,
Then draw its fang with magnanimous deed
And all you acknowledge shall be your own.
Last and first: the cosmic Whole,
The household of Earth and all its inhabitants,
The infinite fugue of human fates,
The hope of vision, of one awareness
Embracing all earth, surmounting strife,
In each true word the poet utters
Calls to attention, advances toward peace.
Vast is the Way, complex beyond knowing,
Yet free, unforced as a child's chanting;
At every step the goal is present
And most when we manage the step of silence.
May all who read this find friends in wisdom
And inspiration for sacred song!
1993
*
READING POETRY AT THE STATE CAPITOL ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON
The hive of government is empty now,
stone wedding-cake of power and hired art,
stately it stands upon the narrow brow
that keeps two lakes apart;
only the overtaxed or overzealous
still burrow, plot and plan
the people's and Earth's bane
of which a headline some months hence will tell us.
Upon a corner of the Capitol Square
given to the people for a weekly fair,
a knot of poets try to raise their voices
above the waning noises
of morning's market; shoppers going home
have little time to spend
upon the word no friend
to the football cheer, the television's drone.
The various causes, too, already fold
their tables, and the meager dollars doled
by citizens whom various wrongs incense,
though few seek out the sense
of the vast web that implicates them all,
which solely through the word
of poets, when it's heard,
relates the part to the comprehended whole.
So thinly now in end-of-summer air
amid the sounds of life's retreat, yet clear,
our voices sing the mating-dance of thought,
the rain-dance that has brought
the lightning down on many a throne
in ages past, and still,
could we reforge the will,
might lift a wave of earth beneath this dome.
So hear us, powers of water, earth and air,
all civic spirits that may linger here
to grieve the ruin of your good intent:
teach us the government
of the eternal and unchanging Way
and show the paths that lead
through minds of those that heed,
that here true counsel's house may stand someday.
fall 1993
*
SESTINA OF THE OCTOBER RAIN
There is that sound in the sound of rain outside
That bids me to speak, what time I wake in sorrow
Before dawn, for thinking of that lady
Whose servant I would be, though she is poor
And for many days I have had of her no sign
That she remembers me in her distant tower.
Long have I known she is prisoned in the tower
And those who would serve her must roam outside
To receive on their brows, as the sign
Of her favor, the tracings of stubborn sorrow,
Sole livery of those who love the poor
And keep faith with them and their constant lady.
In this time she has few who call her lady:
The powers and principalities do so tower
Over all, systematically making poor
All who by will or hap remain outside
Their dominion; their minions sneer at sorrow
And count it folly to believe a sign.
The scored serpent, that is their only sign.
They strenuously boast there is no lady
It cannot charm, no tort or sorrow
It cannot compensate, no lofty tower
Of troth it cannot throw down. They sweep outside,
Mechanically, the refuse of the poor.
They have drawn from her even the hearts of the poor,
Who watch the strutting potentate's every sign,
Hypnotized by a glittering outside
Into spurning the counsel of the lady
And flocking round the foot of the dark tower,
As those whom fear and hunger rule more than sorrow.
For these in the early morning hours I sorrow,
And for many a one who dared be poor
Until a beam from the searchlight in the tower
Fell on them; then they fled, forgetting the sign
They had received, alleging fear that the lady
Would draw them, with arms of remorse, inside.
The rain outside is still. I have spoken my sorrow.
Lady, remember me among your poor
And make my name a sign against the tower.
1994
(published on The Hyper Texts)
*
SUPERFLUOUS PEOPLE
We are the superfluous people.
We are the unionized workers replaced by robots or slaves,
the secretaries ousted by computers.
We are the people of color, the over-50, the people with disabilities,
the ones who don't belong on the team.
We are the displaced homemakers,
the parentless children,
the partnerless parents,
the poets without readers,
the teachers without students,
the students who can't afford college,
the graduates who didn't get hired,
the scientists without grants,
the executives who got downsized.
Why is this?
Isn't there enough work to do in the world?
Aren't there enough stomachs to be filled,
enough limbs to be clothed,
enough babes to be rocked,
enough children and youth to be taught,
enough neighborhoods to be beautified,
enough trees to be planted,
enough fields to be tilled,
enough songs to be sung,
enough stories to be told,
enough riddles to be solved,
enough wounds to be healed,
enough houses and cities to be built right?
But the market does not ask these questions.
The market cannot ask what people need.
It can only ask what those who have the money
want.
Only community can ask
what people need.
And time may be short.
As slave labor replaces free,
as machines replace people,
as large corporations swallow up small ones
and cut their staffs
and buy up the press and the government,
I tell you Spaceship Earth is flying
with a shrinking crew,
a skeleton crew
with skeleton motives,
and the rest of us are not passengers.
We are ballast.
And we feel the moment edging closer
when we could be pushed off.
But let's keep our heads, my friends.
Let us put them together.
Together let us learn to ask the question
what we, the people, need.
We are the superfluous people.
Nobody needs us
except ourselves.
But if you'll say you need me
I'll say I need you.
And we can start.
1995
*
WRITER'S PLACE
We do not come to read here in the pride
of being chosen by those arbiters
who on whatever basis may decide
this person's poem is better, another's worse.
We write because we must; we come to read
because the heart must speak its mind, or break;
and, recognizing one another's need,
each with attention hears the other speak.
It is a humble thing, a humble place,
but greatest things spring from humility --
as the Tao says, the central empty space
give the vessel its utility;
and we may yet be, if we hold this dear,
our city's heart and mind, its mouth and ear.
1995
*
A VALENTINE FOR MY PARENTS
If once a year the praises that I spend
On what this world contains of fair and true
Can interrupt their outward flow, and bend
Back to their origin, then shall you two,
Well-born and of the world's nobility,
Obtain, not all your due, but some small part,
Who gave me life and give it constantly
Not only to myself, but to my art.
If I have learned to move within a form
And gracefully to wear its lightsome bond,
I learned this from the way you served the norm
Ungrudgingly, and faithfully were fond:
Through you the thought that love and law are one
Unbroken beams from the eternal sun.
1996
THE BARD LIADAN, OR PERHAPS ONE OF THE RISHIS, CONSIDERS THE INFORMATION OF A TIME-TRAVELER
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
-- Shakespeare.
Let me be certain I have understood you.
You tell me that you have no guilds of bards
pledged to convene and sing to one another
in sacred measures of what has transpired
between the full and dark, the dark and full,
each offering the fragments of their vision
until an image of the hour take shape,
which the most skilled then set before the people
to put them on their guard against the guileful
and rectify the laws and names of things?
That poets vie in speaking idle words,
promising nothing, making nothing happen?
That for their labors most have no reward
save to be printed on a page perused
by none, except their rivals studious
of the judge’s mind, that they too may be printed?
Ochone, the harp of concord thus untuned
and bardcraft made into a trade for fools!
It is the dark age you must live in surely,
the age our eldest bards foretold last solstice
in such a cold as no one could recall.
But, traveler, if you hear me, as I you,
And if your well of wit is not quite dry,
will you not now return and tell your comrades
the time has come to win word’s honor back,
reforge the canon and the sacred forms,
reconvene the counsels of the wise,
send forth your strongest voices to beseech
the people to return to reason’s measure?
The words of all who say so will be deeds,
worthy of space in the memory of the gods;
the rest is vanity, the trash of time
which time will sweep away.
1997
*
TO THE SHEKHINAH AT WINTER SOLSTICE
Upon this day of darkness, Mother, may
Your image rise and shine in many minds
As the one metaphor of all our caring,
Sign of the being in which we must live.
Your image rises, shines in many minds.
Your light shines forth from one face to another.
Sign of the being in which we must live,
In your presence things fall into place.
Your light shines forth from one face to another.
Under your glance the ways of help appear.
In your presence things fall into place.
You organize our issues and concerns.
Under your glance the ways of help appear.
In your hands the things we do add up.
You organize our issues and concerns.
You are the map, the blueprint of our temple.
In your hands the things we do add up.
You are memory, storehouse of our good.
You are the map, the blueprint of our temple.
You are the meeting-place, the standing-ground.
You are memory, storehouse of our good.
You are mind’s integrity and purpose.
You are the meeting-place, the standing-ground,
Talisman of the freedom of the upright.
You are mind’s integrity and purpose.
You show us how to sift the laws and customs.
Talisman of the freedom of the upright,
Through you we know what we must hold inviolate.
You show us how to sift the laws and customs.
As the one metaphor of all our caring,
Soul of creation, our inviolate House,
Upon this day of darkness, Mother, rise.
[Note: in the Kabbala, the Shekhinah is the female aspect of the Divinity.]
1998
published on Melic and in The Romantics Quarterly
*
SOCIAL SECURITY
Each one has a name...
--Zelda
Just as they need a Social Security number,
each person needs a poetic identity.
A name that is nothing like a number,
that ties them
to the uncountable.
A constellation of syllables that recall
whatever spoke to them
when they were alone.
A name by which they can be called up
when courage is needed,
A name by which they can be held
to the promises of love.
A name like the pouch of charms
round the neck of the shaman,
like the box of small treasures
each child should have the right
to bring to school.
A name that weaves them into the text
of a common life,
a life among kin.
And the poet should be the one
who goes around
giving names.
*
FROM PSALM 119
Note: Psalm 119 is a sequence of 22 alphabetical acrostic poems, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, on the theme of the Law. In the Orthodox world is it the custom to pray for the sick by reciting the sections of Psalm 119 that begin with the letters of the sick person’s name.
Embedded in this text
are the letters of my name,
like surgical instruments
in their case.
The shape of my body within
the body of Your Law.
You are the health of all,
the will by which dry bones
are joined and walk again,
by which the scattering atoms
cohere to a form
intricate as Your Law
and become a living soul.
You are the center that holds
if we hold to you.
I will hold to you,
I will keep Your Law.
Grant me insight into Your Law
and delight in its workings,
grant me the joy that is health!
Preserve me from corruption
and from the outward whirlwind
of things that come loose.
Keep me that I may keep Your Law
and show your strength among the people
for the healing of your world, Sela.
*
MISHPATIM
Exodus 21 - 24
After the tenfold thunder of the dawn,
God’s evening speech set forth a plainer food,
For not upon great principles alone
Is justice built, but on exactitude
And on attention to those situations
Where flesh and blood is likely to fall short:
So the design of highest Wisdom places
Beside the sanctuary the law court.
And with the Hebrew slave the Law begins,
Who at the end of six years must go free,
Because the bonds of Egypt are re-cinched
When folk forget God’s generosity
And human freedom, which are the ground and sense
Of the Creation and of these judgments.
2000
(from Rim of Gold: A Cycle of Sonnets on the Weekly Torah Portion
posted on the website of the Madison Jewish Community Council,
*
from The Consciousness of Earth, ch. 13
Assume the House of Wisdom built, if only
in mind as yet, as round-house of the roads
that lead toward diverse fields of enterprise.
that now divide the Earth. Starting from here,
let us now follow for a little way
only, the outsets of so many quests!
Let us begin with Law, and Shelley’s truth
so well confirmed in all we have considered.
We know there is no life without a form,
nor is there form that is not based on rules,
on algorithms that apply themselves
unconsciously, until the conscious mind,
itself a product of such rules, perceives them,
and makes new rules, and with them builds new forms.
And as the person, so each social body,
each group that has duration and coherence,
is constituted by some law, unwritten
or written, known or unknown to the members.
Likewise the consciousness of Earth as one
body, implies a law that could sustain it.
That Hidden Law, which from the Earth’s foundations
must shine up at this hour when they lie
so nearly stripped, has shown itself through time
in patches to our deepest sense. These patches
we shall connect, and with the picture thus
obtained, compare the tablets of our codes,
from international through national
and local law, down to the rules unwritten
and written of the circles where we move,
even to the workings of the private heart,
where love and law inextricably entwine. [...]
[S]o may within the social sphere our voices
acquire concerted resonance to enlist
compulsion’s power to remove the snares
set for our worser minds and weaker moments;
may legal minds, in trust united, clear
the thorny thickets of prevarication
where darkest motives have carved out their dens,
the unfathomable mass of regulation
that ever at grips with the complexity
of new contrivances conceives itself,
until the pathways of our civil law
become once more transparent to concern.
Hard by the road to Law, the way departs
toward Economics; often will these two
paths interlace themselves beyond discerning;
for half of Law is what belongs to whom,
and all our paths of interchange were paved,
our castles of possession fortified
by Law. Yet Law is not identical
to the logic of the marketplace, whereby,
today, that which is bought and sold too often
sells and buys the buyers and the sellers,
makes people over to suit market needs
or casts them off as superfluities
from a commercial process more and more
tended by robots, owned by robot-owners –
Law issues from the center of the human,
however it be wrested from its source
by Commerce.
Commerce: ancient as the Word.
To give one thing so as to get another
is one sleeve of primordial human habit,
singling us out, as much as syntax does,
from all the animals that beg and rob
and have some dim conception of the sign.
Yet poetry and commerce ill assort.
A poem is a thing of no location;
given to one, it is not kept from others,
nor is it alienated from its maker.
Praise may be purchased, true – and so may silence;
but purchased praise and purchased silence are,
unlike the boughten tool, a suspect thing,
like boughten justice. And when commerce learns
to lay its yardstick to the round of time
and mark off hours, each worth so many grams
of bread, the tangle thickens. For who can
present the log of hours the poem took
to fashion from experience and desire,
drawing its threads from past and farthest future,
its instantaneous form? The poet shrugs
his shoulders, and turns up her empty hands –
a mercy that the monolith of commerce
still has some chinks where poetry can sprout
like moss unsown! But all this is the sign
of poetry’s appurtenance to an order
that commerce in its hypertrophy threatens:
the order of the home, of kin and friends,
wherein the child matures to personhood
and to the stature of a citizen.
Here, at the best, it has sometimes been true
that all receive according to their needs,
that all contribute what they have to give,
that property is an appropriate
belonging, that the thing has dignity,
and that the house was built to house the dwellers,
and not the dwellers shaped to fit the house,
love keeping no accounts but rather counting
on each to do their part, on that good feeling
by which the presence of good faith is known.
The family! an institution, true,
too often marred by private tyrannies,
too often praised by certain who refuse
to understand how their own enterprises
impinge upon its walls; while those who flee it
or would correct its tyrannies, take refuge
in anonymity of public action
where good intentions struggle to define
an all-too-abstract right that seldom fits
the persons. But the House of Wisdom stands
between the private and the public, as
a place where knowledge of particular things
is gathered and summed up, not to a number,
but to a picture wherein each detail
has place and meaning, where ability
and need are known and can be used and filled,
so chartering an economics based
not on the unchecked working of the market
which toward corruption tends to fall and drag
the humans with it from the social center,
and not on centralized control that makes
the people one machine, to grind out goods
ordered by overlords of dubious conscience;
rather on free endeavor counterpoised
by organized awareness and good judgment –
a weight whose composition is the alloy
of carefulness for life’s involved domain,
for worker’s just reward, consumer’s health,
for honest value of the hard-earned coin,
for best use of materials, by which
the earth is honored; for just government
by those whose ears an honest word can reach –
for beauty, in a word which is the sign
of opposites resolved, of many gathered
in one, of true economy – it is
the splendor of that truth which is our life.
[...]
NOTES
“...Shelley’s truth...” That “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (op.cit.)
“We know there is no life without a form,...” I would like to acknowledge the influence of a poem by Leonard Borenstein, “The Lesson of My Life,” in shaping the passage that follows.
The fact that commerce is a distinctive feature of human society was pointed out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
EULOGY FOR MY FATHER
He was never wrong, according to his students,
Who made a farewell song with that refrain.
With almost a fanatic rectitude
He visualized the rock-layers that had lain
Rigid in earth’s foundations; he thought back
Until their ancient movements were made plain.
It was not in him to let thought go slack
Nor say the thing which is not, nor to claim
More than his due, or deviate from the track
Of obligations, valid with the same
Force as the laws that gave the crystal habit,
Implicit in the universe’s frame.
That sense of structure, of the way things fit,
Was also his in the domain of words.
He taught his students writing, kept them at it,
And when, a child, I took to writing verse,
He taught me how to scan. I used to see
In him a shade of distant ancestors,
Chief Druids, masters of a poetry
That ordered what the people knew and did.
“Farewell” I say to him now newly free,
And: “Stand us now and ever in good stead.”
April 1999
*
AN INVITATION
We gather here to see
faces from which we need not hide our face,
to hear the sound of honest speech, to share
what dreams have etched upon the sleeping brain,
what the still voice has said, when heavy hours
plunged us to regions of the mind and life
not mentioned in the marketplace: to find
and match the threads of common destinies,
designs grimed over by our thoughtless life --
A sanctuary for the common mind
we seek. Not to compete, but to compare
what we have seen and learned, and to look back
from here upon that world where tangled minds
create the problems they attempt to solve
by doubting one another, doubting love,
the wise imagination, and the word.
For, looking back from here upon that world,
perhaps ways will appear to us, which when
we only struggled in it, did not take
counsel of kindred minds, lay undiscovered;
perhaps, reflecting on the Babeled speech
of various disciplines that make careers,
we shall find out some speech by which to address
each sector of the world's fragmented truth
and bring news of the whole to every part.
We say the mind, once whole, can mend the world.
To mend the mind, that is the task we set.
How many years? How many lives? We do not know;
but each shall bring a thread.
1975
(published in B’Or Ha-Torah, Healers Magazine, and on The Hyper Texts [www.thehypertexts.com])
*