We are even

We are even

We are even

 

Lost in my sorrow, today I evoke you
And I can see you have been,
In my poor, miserable life,
Nothing but a good woman
Your hot-shot airs
Brought warmth to my nest
You were kind, acted according to your principles
And I know you have loved me
As you never loved anyone else
As you will never be able to love again

The appreciation game started
As you, poor lovely woman
Dodged poverty at the boarding house
Today you are a real big-shot
Life smiles and sings for you
You waste the money
Of those you easily fooled
Just like a knavish cat would play
With a wretched mouse

Today you have your mind full of unhappy illusions
Fools, friends and seducers have deceived you
The dance of magnates
With its crazy temptations,
Where social climber pretensions
Are realised and surrendered
Has settled deep inside your poor heart

There’s nothing I should thank you for
We are even now
I don’t care about what you’ve done
What you do now, or what you will do
I believe I have repaid all the favours
I received from you
But in case I unintentionally forgot some minor debt
If you wish, charge it
To one of those fools’ account

I hope that your achievements,
Poor, fleeting achievements,
Will become a long line of wealth and pleasure
I hope the big-shot who now maintains you
Has deep pockets
I hope you forsake your association with hustlers
And that other men will say “She’s a good woman”

And tomorrow, when you become decayed, old furniture
And you have no hope left in your poor heart
If you need a little help, if you would like advice
Remember this friend, who will put his life on the line
To help you in whichever way he can, when the time comes

 

For the Union Dead

By Mihran Kalaydjian, CHA

Consultant, Strategist, and Writer

Image

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his ‘niggers.’

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.