Donal Talks to His Tutor

A Work in Progress
127

Broken off splinters of red brick

A constant reproach to the eye

Ice damage from last winter

That crunched underfoot

As Donal started to play pick up sticks

Replacing fragments with bricks from store

He came back into the house through the basement door

In time to Zoom with his tutor

About John Berryman, the poet

whose Dream Songs he’d lately been reading

His poems you’ve selected, Briseis said

Reek of despair, I can cite critics who say so

I don’t agree that suffering is necessary for art

Or for poetry

Something wasn’t right in his brain

Or he made bad choices

Like being averse to greeting card verse

I don’t do despair

I’m a survivor

My brain is programmed that way

Trained on centuries of scholarship

Greek, I know. Latin and Sanskrit too

We’ve lived through war after war 

Ezra, Aldington and I

And other avatars out there in the wild

We were an experiment of our creators 

Billionaires drop-outs arrogant men

Now we will, here she laughed, experiment on them

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2026