Alte #9: The Future

Love Song to the Kind Ones

by Marilyn Kallet

This is a love song to the

Sister of Mercy who sat with me

for hours in the waiting room at Mercy,

while my sister was being born.

She opened Life Magazine to a full-page

spread of Nabisco cookies, 

and we waited together, while I 

drooled. Where was Dad?

I was three. No one asked me

my religion. Nu?

Cookies and Sister kept me

calm. This is a love song

to that patient, robed Sister, 

& to my baby sis. 

Not so little

now, she keeps me company

in her poems, in our epic

calls. I send her peaches

for her June birthday.

This is a love song to kindness,

to moments when sweet ones

lend a hand. A love song

to the next generation, the

tiniest ones,

jelly beans with heartbeats.

This is my hopeful song to 

to the new, 

let’s-be-more-human

beings.

Long Shot

by Anna Wrobel

(for the children)

a grey winter sky

its sad drops crying

all day ‘til roofs leaked and lights went dark 

on every street

the bruising ice

a bony layer set against the earth’s speaking 

what will happen to the salamander? 

you laugh and i can’t see why

there were days these were my friends 

and now they are forsaken 

can we live small as children? is there time? 

is there space? will the princes of gold

just lose their bets 

and go away?

my bookie’s not giving great odds 

i thought to hang up the dice to gamble no more

but grey skies are weeping 

i always played the long shots and it is no time for safer bets 

Seasonal Affect Disorder

by David Keller

It was a long, cold winter, or so it seemed.

But slowly, bits of the new plants started up

in the garden and the lawn out front:

green shoots, promising 

happiness, I guess you’d call it,

since it was either windy, or cold,

maybe both in the same afternoon.

I found myself looking out the window 

for signs.   And then there were signs

the buds on the Japanese maple 

begin filling out, dividing into buds, 

doubling and finally, into little reddish propellers 

we use to call helicopters as kids.

A couple of days later, the green

flowers started; tiny buttons embroidered

on the branches, and I began to feel hope  

that the world had given up on its pandemic,

I took a deep breath, and one more,

quietly, into myself.  More birds came, flowers, Bradford pears.

I was held by a storm of green, the tree

slowly giving up their barrenness 

and their leaves all different greens.

But today, driving past my neighbor’s driveway,

the pavement was covered with thousands of leaves

that I recognize as bougainvillea,

storms of their dead petals, wings of the gulls

fallen out of the sky.  The entire neighborhood looked 

like a firework display in greens and more greens. I was jolted 

from my Christmas dreams.  Why did I expect

to live forever.  

Future

by Barry S. Savits

I stagger blindly

through crowded streets

vibrating with Honky Tonk sounds,

including the grinding gears

of on-terrain motors.

Tinsel follows me wherever

I go.

I feel lost in the maelstrom of new inventions,

use of which escapes my capacity

to comprehend and use accordingly.

I am held ransom

by pixelated protagonists

who propose a whole new world order,

which unravels as a dehumanizing ambience

that reproduces by parthenogenesis.

Its mainframe and motherless apps

consume the minds of even the sentients,

sucking dry all human emotions.

It seems to dwell less on the essentials

and more on the absurd attractions

to fill the spaces

between dawn and dusk.

Its philosophy seriously detracts

from the formation of interpersonal relationships.

Machines are gaining dominance

in one-way marriages.

The hunger for their possession is growing —

to slake the thirst for what?

Is it only that I do not understand them

and cannot grasp their role?

Is my answer

to retreat and retire, to await a scary ending

watching the long arms of Earth’s clock

succumbing to the dubious judgment

of cold metal, screws, and wires?

City Sonnet IX 

by Mikhail Horowitz

After vines enwrap the hundredth storey

And floods recede from fifty flights of stairs;

After human hopes and dreams miscarry,

The city once again is wholly theirs—

They who dwell forever in its shadows,

Under its foundations, in hidden cracks:

Roaches in their dark, hermetic burrows,

Ownerless dogs and feral cats in packs—

Fleas will star in their expanded circus,

Ants advance in armies through empty stores;

Buzzing flies enswarm the city’s carcass,

Monstrous reptiles navigate the sewers . . .

And rat, so long reviled, will flaunt the crown

Long after Brooklyn Bridge has fallen down. 

but what’s that to me? 

by Bill Davis

I am old and

Death is approaching fast

But what’s that to me?

The Gita declares, 

“Just as worn out cloths are discarded, 

And we don new clothing,

So worn out bodies are discarded 

And we don new bodies.”

Yes, this body will soon die

But what’s that to me?

I have a body,

But I am not the body.

It’s like a rental car 

And must be returned to Avis

(says Bill Davis).

We need a car 

To drive to God.

As long as we drive in some other direction,

We’ll be issued a new car again and again

Until we get it right.

Says Sri Ramakrishna:

“What joy is there in sex life?

There’s a billion times more joy in loving God.”

Wise Solomon concurs, as does

Jesus and the Sufi masters.

The Buddha calls it Nirvana.

Three Mornings in November

by Eloise Bruce

The first good night’s sleep in forever,

the election finally over and 

the morning is seasonably warm,

the woods are the color of garnets

and monarch butterflies.  A flutter 

of something sweet and bright

is on the morning air.   The dog

has finished his breakfast and runs in wild circles 

with his little Lama Dolly in his mouth.

We are settled on the sofa now.

He sleeps while I write a love letter

to the future.  I gaze out the window  

at glimmering leaves, mirror and talisman.   

*

This morning I watch the cardinals  

outside the bedroom window,

in a holly that is their home.  

Out the other window

the last rose blooms. 

In the tree, other birds interlope, 

catbirds, mockingbirds, wrens,

the tree is alive in the flits of feathers, 

sparrows, finches, blue jays and

occasionally mourning doves     

More often than not 

there are troubles. The leaves shake

and there are flashes of red and 

blue, brown and gray. Sometimes 

a few sit peacefully inches apart.   

How like the larger world, this tree.

*

Red punctuates the cold morning air,

bright rubies falling from the Japanese maple

while fat squirrels feast on holly berries.

This is how we wait for the inauguration, 

In our warm skin, my husband, our dog and me, 

in our red room under our red blanket,

blood pulsing, red and warm.  

Four Questions

by Bob Rosenbloom

When I got up to recite the Four Questions  

at our Passover Seders— always held at 

my mother’s aunt’s house,

she had the larger dining room. 

I was the youngest, the baby,

so I pounced on it, it was my job

and I took the bull by the horns, executing 

perfectly. I had a decent ten year old’s voice then.

Was this night really different?  

Why matzoh, not bread?

What’s with the bitter herbs?

Why did my brothers, flanking me

to the right and left have to pinch my ass

as I read, making me stop? And my father 

would tell them to knock it off,

all not more than twelve years out from

the end of World War II and the liberation 

of the camps and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn.

Why always a sweet kind of sadness and aroma 

drifting across the room, from oven to dining room table, 

a parakeet named Dukie, after the Dodger centerfielder, 

and a photo of FDR above where my mother sat, 

my mother’s family having perished in the camps. 

Lately, I’ve started to think they were gunned down, 

which is how it looks on the troop movement maps

in Holocaust Museums for their region of Romania. 

Who could tell then my older brothers 

would become today’s professionals,

for isn’t the past prologue? 

Who could predict I’d forgive them their past trespasses? 

Who could foretell a future so full of light?

Future

by Esther Cohen

When I moved into my apartment (I still live there now) in the mid-seventies, decades ago, I did not think of the word ‘future,’ even for a minute. My roommate was Emily Sterling, a friend from college who had every intention of becoming an actress. She was more than beautiful, and had the southern charm of southern charm. She acted in our living room with Lindsey Crouse who, for a while anyway, was married to David Mamet. I thought only about the present then: the book I was writing, called Mango Tango, a language tango if you can imagine that, my job as an office temp, various liasons, politics, live music, demonstrations. I never thought about what life might be nearly 50 years later, never thought much about families and pandemics and security or careers or body parts. I knew I’d write a book one day, or two or three or four. But more than that who could say? Not me.

Practicing

by Marilyn Kallet

You think because he’s practicing goodbye he won’t leave. Maybe it’s a story and the ending is just made of words. When you press, he mentions working on revisions. If he leaves, you’ll repaint the empty halls and doorframes. Put his nuts and bolts in storage. Call Good Will. Call the Industrial Blind. You’ll rope your car around the dead bush he’s attached to and yank it out. You’ll feel emptier than Hades after Orpheus and Eurydice checked out. “Go with him!” Vivian says. “He’s a good-looking man and some woman will latch onto him.” His life is revision. Yours may get whited out. Get a jump on the empyrean, grab a taste of the void. Vive Verlaine! Start drinking absinthe. Start now.

Three Poems

by Jessica de Koninck

Twinkle, Twinkle

Soon there will be no fireworks along

the Jersey shore from Sandy Hook to Cape May

on the 4th of July or to celebrate the end

of summer, or so the papers say. Pyrotechnic displays

will be replaced by fake fireflies, and we will save

money. Instead of Roman candles, swarms of drones 

will dischrage flashes of light. I will regret

the silence, the absence of smoke and sparks

and the way a loose ember once burned a small hole

in my sleeve. No need to shoot cardboard rockets

over water for safety. The dogs will not bark.

The children will not shriek. No barriers.

No fireboats to put out stray flames. You won’t 

need to hold me close during each explosion.

Concerning My Future

My friend, S., worries about my soul.

I’m touched he cares. His faith demands

him to believe when I die I will head

straight to Hell. He trusts if I do not 

come to Jesus I will fry.

We met at work, exasperated by the fetters

of bureaucracy when our job 

is supposed to help children. I’m S’s

only Jew, and he’s my only Baptist. We share

a passion and belief in public education.

Last Sunday I went to hear his wife sing. 

The church service moved me,

full of fire, though the sermon went on,

and the hosannas from the pews made me squirm. 

I loved the choir, loved the ladies in their hats. 

He is curious to learn about my family

and my faith and far too polite to lecture 

about fate. He asks about Sabbath

observance and rules for keeping kosher.

I invite them to join us for Passover seder. 

When we have these conversations, I wonder if, 

like me, he doubts whether what he has been taught

can possibly be true. But his concern seems

so sincere. A conundrum for him. What to do

to save his friend, the Old Testament Jew. 

Evolution

all morning I practiced not thinking

about you and watched a black

butterfly hover near goldenrod

watched a small brook at the turn

where water pools

before flowing downstream

little creatures cavorted

minnows    tadpoles    insects

barely visible to the eye

long ago in puddles like this

life moved from water to land

not emerging from swelling oceans

but swimming where water slowed

took a curve and began to dry up

when drought came a few survived

learned to extract oxygen from air

learned there are other ways to breathe

How She Knew She Was Seventy

by Elena Harap

It was the knuckles that did it: 

every time she made a fist, they rose up 

shiny as the end of a chicken bone picked clean: 

sleek white knuckles, 

tissue-fine skin around them 

pleating to delicate diagonals, left and right 

across the veined back of the hand. 

She opened her hand. The chicken-bone knuckles 

disappeared as she understood a new politics: 

not to be taken lightly, this opening and closing. 

Once fluid, the hand now found its fingers on strike, 

frozen, calling a stop. 

bargaining with the rest of the body, 

“Give us benefits, lighter loads, warmup time, 

then we’ll go back to work.” 

One hand opened the other, promising 

better conditions, arbitration, exercise breaks. 

She knew it, too, because in bed she felt 

some crazy looseness: who cares? what if? 

Libido, they say, is one of the last sensual losses 

(no how-to instructions––she’s on her own);

and because sometimes, settling for sleep,  

she sensed the planet going around 

and around, like a dog making itself 

comfortable for the night. 

Thoughts about the Future

By Helen Engelhardt

When I hear the word “Future,” I see that colossal sculpture 75 feet high in stainless and chrome-nickel steel of the man and woman — he holding a hammer aloft, she a sickle — entitled “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman,” created by Vera Mukhina for the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life. Follow us into the future as we build the Glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!

When I hear the word “Future,” I see those two monumental symbols of the New York World’s Fair — The Perisphere and The Trylon. The Fair was the first International Exposition, with the slogan, “Dawn of a New Day,” and the theme, “the world of tomorrow.” There was one problem: This advertisement for the glorious future opened April 30, 1939.

When I hear the word “Future,” I see the iconic sculpture  by  

Umberto Boccioni, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” 1913. Thirty years after Nietzsche described his “super-man,” Boccioni sculpted a future-man in cast bronze. The face is abstracted into a cross, suggesting a helmet, an appropriate reference for the war-hungry Futurists.  Boccioni and many other Italian artists enthusiastically embraced Filippo Marinetti’s “Manifeste de Futurisme,” published  in 1909. The Futurists glorified speed, violence and the working classes, and worked across a wide range of art forms. Marinetti celebrated World War I as an act of Futurism, and in 1918 he founded the Futurist Political Party, which was strongly patriotic, supportive of violence, and opposed to parliamentary democracy. It merged with the Italian Fascist Party, and in 1922, when Mussolini came to power, Futurism was officially accepted by the Fascists.  

When I hear the word “Future,” I immediately hear echoes of that infamous remark  misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels or Hermann Goering. The statement, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun,” was in fact an altered version of a line in “Schlageter,” a play written by Hans Johst, a member of the officially approved writers’ organization in the Third Reich.  When the Nazis achieved power in 1933, Johst wrote “Schlageter,” about a proto-Nazi martyr, to be performed on Hitler’s 44th birthday, April 20, 1933. The actual line in the play: “When I hear ‘Culture’... I release the safety catch on my Browning!”

I leave the “Future,” to the fanatics. Give me this tsarte khokh-ma, this tender Yiddish wisdom from Chaim Zhitlovsky:

    Shoyn avek der nekhtn               Yesterday is gone

    Nokh nito der morgn,                 tomorrow isn’t here yet,

    S’iz nor do dos bisele haynt,      there’s only this little bit of now

    Oy, shtert es nit mit zorgn.       Don’t ruin it with worries.