The Saints Go Marching In

“Voted that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.”—minutes of the town council of Milford, Connecticut, 1640

Sanctity

Of sanctity we make no bones:

On stolen land, we build our homes;

All countries in which men abide

Knew slavery and genocide.

Don't confess to ancestral crimes—

You were not there in those bad times.

Just be quite sure that we can say:

“They fake things fairer now today!”

Epigraph source: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 192.

The Pitiless Bronze

Ours is not a world propitious to Poetry,

Though for poets’ tales it is, with screwball odds:

Homer’s “pitiless bronze” slew living, breathing bods!

Uhlans charged

Nazi Panzers at Krojanty.*

Fishing boats trump aircraft carriers in the Pinkish Sea.

* Evidently Polish cavalry did not in fact charge Nazi tanks at Krojanty in 1939, but did charge machine guns.

Speaking in Tongues

When I was ten or so in the Karoo

I went to meetings with a pal or two

Where rustic Pentecostals spoke in tongues.

We sidled among the yawping grownups,

Hoping to score some of the pastry treats

On hand, Evangelical service done,

Among these, especially, koeksiesters,

Donut braids cooked in spiced sugar syrup

(theirs was the Afrikaner sort, sprung from

the Cape Malay) that the urgent gabble

Seeming summoned, sweet as the just deserts

Served up in sophistry’s foody battle.

Not mnemonic madeleines, De Aar no

Combray, nor I a Proust, their memory

Still serves today, seventy-five years on,

To evoke the unintelligible:

Poets echoing Xenoglossia’s* bark

Now backed by a strong academic team;

Unfriended pigeons poisoned in the park.†

Every book a preternatural scream.

* Xenoglossia is distinguished from simple glossolalia inasmuch as the words uttered are considered to be in an actual foreign tongue—albeit one unknown to the speaker.

† Thanks for this line to the late Tom Lehrer (1928–2025).

Header image from Immaculate Bites,

https://www.africanbites.com/traditional-koeksisters.

Monday, November 3, 2025

On Perusing a Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925–2025, edited by Kevin Young*

These worthy poems are all editors’ selections

From thousands come across the transom.

To tell the truth the composite effect is rather glum.

What a relief to find that Ogden Nash made it in!

But how could they omit the mighty lines of Samuel Hoffenstein,

Who illuminated my childhood in the Great Karoo?

They might at least have included one.

In truth I'd rather have a century of poems

The sainted editors considered but rejected.

You bet your doggone life they'd be much more fun!

*New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025

Halloween 2025