Sample Poems by Frederick Feirstein

What Happened

What happened to Mozart who sang like a bird
More golden than Yeats’ imagination wrought,
Where is Shakespeare’s passionate thought,
Does his ghost pace on Hamlet’s stage?
And what of Dante who consigned to Hell
His former friends who did not treat him well?
Where is Sophocles whose simple myth
Became the basis of psychoanalysis.
And Freud who smoked his mouth to death,
What happened to him, to his depth
Of soul—is it lying like a clay shard
In an earthen hole, and poor Dylan Thomas
Who ranted “Death shall have no dominion,”
Knowing he lied, or the Brothers Grimm,
What became of them, dust in sunlight
Turned like a clock—watch it long enough
And you’ll go mad, or Paganini
Whose fingers danced and women swooned,
Or Gower, or Chaucer who made
Such exquisite mixes of English and French
The birds that slepen al with open eye
Would weep to hear the Earth took him?
What happened to Donne who would have us listen
To sermons about our limitations,
And Boccacio, a name to stuff in your mouth
As a squirrel stuffs nuts when fall leaves redden?
What of Herbert with his convictions of heaven
And Apollinaire, that fantastic name,
Verlaine, Villon, Baudelaire, names
That once strode Paris, and Renoir, Cezanne?
What happened to Picasso, where did he go,
And Marc Chagall who would live forever,
And Michelangelo upside down,
Painting all night like a motley clown,
And Jane Austen, so precise about the minutiae
Of interactions, where is her flesh
With its intricate cells,
And Emily Dickinson who lived alone
As if time never happened.
What happened to Einstein,
His brain in a jar,
And Galileo, Copernicus, Blake?
Put them together and what do you make
Of these disappeared, where did they go?
We know but we are too timid to say,
Of Whitman who whistled his own way,
Hands in his pockets, ready to loaf,
Or Frost that dark and folksy man,
Beckett waiting in a garbage can.
All these geniuses and little you
With a pen in your hand, a non-believing Jew,
What of your life, where did it go?
It passed in an instant. Oh.

To My Younger Self

The past is like a library after dark
Where we sit on the steps trading stories
With characters we imagined ourselves to be.
Neighbors in clothing from our childhood stroll by,
Unmolested, nodding at us, benevolently.
One with your father’s face tips his fedora.
You lower your face in shame. I look back.
Someone is sitting at a long table,
Reading in the moonlight. I must look startled.
He holds a forefinger to his lips,
As if it is a candle for the dead.
You tap me on the shoulder and I turn back.
The street is dangerously empty,
Except for the newsstand lit yellow
Where your mother in a blue nightgown
Showing beneath her coat buys The Times,
A pack of Kools and, eyeing us, lights one.
You race to her, turn a corner. Goodbye.
I’m frightened as if I’m a foreigner
In a city under siege. Yet I know
It is still mid-century. Underground
Are only subways carrying boisterous
Party-goers or somber family men
Working the night shift or harmless bookies
Respectful of the No Smoking signs.
I walk to where the newsstand, shut,
Advertises brand names I’d forgotten.
I shove my hands in my pockets and whistle
A song we danced to when we were young.
I walk on for blocks, until I smell
Smoke from the burning borough of the Bronx.

Twentieth Century

A winter evening under a John Sloan El.
Fedoras tilt in unison against the wind.
The pink neon lights of a Polish bar
Invite Grandpa in, while my son
Does pushups on the rug, and I chin
In my mother’s kitchen, and my uncle
Argues he could beat Willie Pep
If Grandpa would let him turn pro. I burn
In his disappointment, forty years ago.
Now Grandpa comes brawling into the street
And, arm-weary, staggers home on schnapps
And sits me down to watch Sugar Ray dance
Till he turns into Counting Crows, and my son
In my uncle’s pecks flexes in the window
Where stenos in thin coats huddle against the snow.
One of them my mother, seeing my unborn face
In a taxi, hails it and rushes home.

Separation

I ran out of the house
The world said Boo
I ran back to the house
My mother said I
I ran out of the house
The world said Die
I ran back to the house
My mother said Why
I ran out of the house
The world said Who
I ran back to the house
My mother said Lie
I ran out of the house
The world said Dread
I ran back to the house
My mother was dead.