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A Pun for Al Gelpi

Jesus got mad one day

at an apricot tree.

He said, “Peter, you

of the Holy See,

Go see if the tree is ripe.”
“The tree is not yet ripe,”
reported back Peter the Rock.

“Then let it wither!”
Jesus wanted an apricot.

In the morning, the tree

had withered,

Like the ear in the agony

of the garden,

Struck down by the sword.

Unready.

What means this parable?

Everybody

better see.

You’re really sipping

When your glass

is always empty.

“I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets ; 

My overcoat too was becoming ideal ;

I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal ;

Oh dear me! what marvellous loves I dreamed of !

My only pair of breeches had a big whole in them.

– Stargazing Tom Thumb, I sowed rhymes along my way.

My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear.

– My stars in the sky rustled softly.

And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides

On those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops

Of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine ; 

And while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows,

I plucked like the strings of a lyre the elastics 

Of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart ! ”

-Arthur Rimbaud

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

-Sharon Olds

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-William Ernest Henley

Wintermaerchen- Heinrich Heine Capitol 1-excerpt

I’m traurigen Monat November war’s,

Die Tage wurden trueber,

Der Wind riss von den Baeumen das Laub,

Da reist ich nach Deutschland hinueber.

Und als ich an die Grenze kam,

Da fuehlt ich an die Grenze kam,

Da fuehlt ich ein staerkeres Klopfen

In meiner Brust, ich glaube sogar

Die Augen begunnen zu tropfen.