A Cup of Coffee

The schemes of kings, emperors and retainers,
lobbyists in crisp black suits,
the clicks of heels, high and low, proper shirts, skirts,
slim legs, carnations,
smiles, all the proper gifts exchanged and
the others, mistakenly perhaps (but in good faith)
addressed and delivered by aides de camp.

Conference halls, lit by bright balloons,
Policy speeches and policy meetings.
Committees and their reports.
White papers and green lamps on the burnished tables,
the conference rooms prepared, the delegates chosen,
the NGOs, their plans submitted and approved,
budgets prepared, flight reservations made,
the grants and fundraisers, the billeting arranged
Arrivals, hotel, home, the whole world assembled.

The grand foyer and the masterpiece denouncing war,
the great dome and beneath it
neatly raked rows arranged in semicircle,
earplugs carrying simultaneous translations.

Wheels within wheels,
gears, pulleys, rope,
chain and chainblock,
timber and hoist,
winches and flatbeds,
crane and hook.
Diesel engines feeding cables,
dams, rotors, reactors,
wind and solar panels
all feeding the one machine,
the world’s great labor,
the constant endless hew
—the scaffolding to the sky—
all to one purpose:
to remove the mote
from Israel's eye.

Aren’t you sick to death of Holocaust poetry?
How many times do we have to have our noses thrust
Between cracks into gassy showers, glowing ovens?
One cringes at the mention of boxcars, the image itself a cliché,
the same six million bodies used over and over as ballast
for lightweight arguments, every bad executive another Hitler,
every battle another genocide. How sick I am of it!
The past is past. What good is it to dig it up again?

Milady attended the most reformed of synagogues,
Our Lady of the Thousand Mitzvahs,
and learned so very much from the rabbi,
establishing her pedigree to imprint from her lofty podium
from which to aim—without prejudice—upon us
a perfumed pee from her powdered pudendum.

© Dan Goorevitch, 2003, 2007