Dreams of Disenchantment

Poetry by Michael Burch

OF CIVILISATION AND DISENCHANTMENT 

Suddenly uncomfortable
to stay at my grandfather’s house—
actually his third new wife’s,
in her daughter’s bedroom
—one interminable summer 
with nothing to do,
all the meals served cold,
even beans and peas—

Lacking the words to describe
ah!, those pearl-lustrous estuaries—
strange omens, incoherent nights.

Seeing the flares of the river barges
illuminating Memphis,
city of bluffs and dying splendours.

Drifting toward Alexandria,
Pharaos, Rhakotis, Djoser’s fertile delta,
lands at the beginning of a new time and “civilization.”

Leaving behind sixty miles of unbroken cemetery,
Alexander’s corpse floating seaward,
bobbing, milk white, in a jar of honey.
 
Memphis shall be waste and desolate,
without an inhabitant.
Or so the people dreamed, in chains.

(Published by The Centrifugal Eye and The Centrifugal Eye Fifth Anniversary Anthology)



JUST DESSERTS

“The West Antarctic ice sheet
might not need a huge nudge
to budge.”

And if it does budge,
denialist fudge
may force us to trudge
neck-deep in the sludge!

(The first stanza is a quote by paleo-climatologist Jeremy Shakun in the Science magazine.)

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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