Poetry by Michael R. Burch
Epitaph for a Refugee Child I lived as best I could, and then I died. Be careful where you step: the grave is wide. Epitaph for a Refugee Mother Find in her pallid, dread repose, no hope, alas!, for a human Rose. who, US? jesus was born a palestinian child where there’s no Room for the meek and the mild ... and in bethlehem still to this day, lambs are born to cries of “no Room!” and Puritanical scorn ... under Herod, Trump, Bibi their fates are the same— the slouching Beast mauls them and WE have no shame: “who’s to blame?” (First published in Setu) Excerpts from “Travels with Einstein” I went to Berlin to learn wisdom from Adolph. The wild spittle flew as he screamed at me, with great conviction: “Please despise me! I look like a Jew!” So I flew off to ’Nam to learn wisdom from tall Yankees who cursed “yellow” foes. “If we lose this small square,” they informed me, earth’s nations will fall, dominoes!” I then sat at Christ’s feet to learn wisdom, but his Book, from its genesis to close, said: “Men can enslave their own brothers!” (I soon noticed he lacked any clothes.) So I travelled to bright Tel Aviv where great scholars with lofty IQs informed me that (since I’m an Arab) I’m unfit to lick dirt from their shoes. At last, done with learning, I stumbled to a well where the waters seemed sweet: the mirage of American “justice.” There I wept a real sea, in defeat. (First published in Café Dissensus)
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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