The Ultralarge

It seems that I’ve attained an age

Distinguished for sagacity,

But how on earth, in all the world,

Might wisdom yet adorn a sage?

The Ultralarge spells dearth to me.

The only place I wish to go—the

piccolo mondo antico,

I left behind—in Seventy-Two??*

Oh, then, I all too little knew!

Those others all knew little, too.

The Ultralarge was growing fast.

Rough winds around its focus whirled.

The mind's umbrella, tightly furled,

Could not perk up the dying past.

*Antonio Fogazzaro’s 1895 novel Piccolo mondo antico, "Little Old World,” was filmed in 1941, directed by Mario Soldati (1906–1999), who, when I knew him in Berkeley in the 1970s, kindly imagined that I might one day be a poet.

#PiccoloMondoAntico trovi sempre quel che cerchi!

Sunday, August 3, 2025

Giving a Hoot

“The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk,”*

We know. But what great power does the bird confer

On Greek Athena (Minerva is her Roman name),

Born with her panoply of arms from God's brain?

It almost seems redundant to explain:

Owls see in the dark. From it Athena learned

To discern the ideal alongside the real—

Thus, we may venture, how to give a hoot.

It won't offend you if I make it plain:

The passengers should not trash the train.

Marx said he'd turned old Hegel upside down.

And so he did, and shook his pockets out,

From whose contents we took our route,

Who now have lost the plan and live in doubt.

*G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right (1821)

Saturday, August 2, 2025

Rewrite Man

Andrea Mantegna, Caesar's Triumph. Ca. 1484–92. Hampton Court Palace, London

July, the month just ended,

Is named for Julius Caesar

Who boasts in his memoirs

Of slaughtering over a million

Celts and half a million Germans.

He exaggerated a bit, it seems,

But genocide was his calling card:

The Gauls' language is extinct;

Their French descendants speak

A child of Caesar's Latin tongue.

August, now commencing,

Honors Julius's heir Augustus,

Who ruled a vast empire

Based on slavery from end to end.

No slouch at homicide, moreover!

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Are named for Norse warrior gods

Borne in raiding Viking longships

To loot, enslave, and murder

In what would later be called "the UK."

You'd like to change this tell-tale nomenclature?

The very best of brutish luck with that!

P.S. Don’t forget to rename Indiana while you're at it!

Note: The Gauls' leader Vercingetorix was imprisoned in Rome for six years after his surrender, then paraded through the streets and ceremonially garrotted in 46 BCE to celebrate Caesar's formal Triumph.

Friday, August 1, 2025