Sudden Proclamations

[PrinceMyshkin]

for Ed and Lesley Pechter




Let's not haggle over madness.
The seed will grow up
or down, as it pleases.
The heart of calamity's not there
but in waiting for that stranger
who is here, already waiting.

"Clasp hands and come to the mountain,"
you've planned to say to her
(the female to your male half-nature),
"Bring mustard seed, and furtive wine.
A pinch of craziness
salts the brain
and brings up the flavour of it."

You've been tasting it, alone
and bland, until you want to go mad,
but only love will give permission for that:
the heart making mischief, lop-
sided dancing with destiny.

If she were to come (at last
and at last!) you'd speak to her
with the thoroughly reckless wit
of the formerly hopeful in love,
who've almost resigned themselves
to baking biscuits and winter bread.

Kings (you'd pronounce), have suffered
Because of the lack of love,
And queens
Have issued sudden proclamations.

To wit:

Gather the nursemaids
Of sorrow, the seven ladies of grief
And their hand-maidens, Lust
And Double Tongue and
Seeming Innocence, and all the others.

Bind up their tongues with bitter
Spice and lay sharp poultices
Against their eyes. I am going down
Where none of you can attend me
To find the bright, false heart
Implanted in me long ago
And root out suffering.

I, the Queen, hereby declare:
The Queen shall suffer no more.


The Queen shall suffer no more.






J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992

[AuntShecky]

I really liked it from the stanza that begins with the word
"kings" down to the end of the piece.

Very apt, that word choice of "pronounce." It does connote a more "regal" tone rather than the plebian "say."
Some film critic for the New Yorker, it was either Pauline Kael or Judith Crist, once wrote that she got a kick out of the fact that in Hollywood biblical epics the characters don't just say their lines, they "pronounce" them.

The title rocks!
The closing repeated punchline is boffo!

Well-done!

[PrinceMyshkin]

The closing repeated punchline is boffo!


To paraphrase a great imagist poem, so much depended, for me, on readers picking up on the irony of that repeated last line. I am so grateful that you appear to have read it as intended.