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

Now

For the poet William Stafford, in memoriam

Now we must try to go to sleep again

The cat meows softly in the bedroom dark

The night is quiet here, though downtown

There must be plenty of noise out there, I don't hear it

Only my tinnitus humming steadily away—

Like cosmic background radiation, I say,

An old friend

Every hour or two a Norfolk Southern goods train rumbles through the "back forty"

Cats teach us how to be alone in the world

Free and unafraid.

The smallest animal is wiser than a man:

Things you can't think, it can.

Thursday, July 31, 2025