Donal Bereaved

A Work in Progress 
8

So memory swings on the hinge of time

turns Fridays to Saturdays to Sundays

adds one more day to what was always known

making all of time one day older

and Friday the 1st becomes Saturday the 2nd 

and Donal looked up 1954

and saw it was somewhat as he remembered

a New Year’s party that Friday night

turning into a Saturday when his parents didn’t come home 

and then first light on Sunday the 3rd his mother came home a widow 

& 

after that 

his father no longer existed

except as a photograph

where he was by his motorbike 

with the sidecar

Donal could imagine

another ending

that night his father left for the party

and never came home

that he traveled away

like Odysseus

and

might yet still return

Donal went in search of missing words

casting imagery onto Achilles’ shield

summoning a storm to greet Aeneas

invoking Pound’s Cantos

Dido he knew Carthage personified

Hawaii where Merwin sailed

Venice for Pound

Donal felt the call of his peers

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

Donal

A Work in Progress 
7

…in a library aisle 

                         a scroll newly added

telling of Donal standing between two shores

not wanting to get where he thought he was going

he’d surprised that flint eyed black clad boatman coming on board

taking two coins off his own aware eyes 

amazed

for he’d stepped ashore in New York instead 

of where he thought was going

nineteen sixties New York

where he first found love 

then love absent

first realized poems accepted sometimes liked

New York City’s so full of life death spills over its edges 

an overflowing Hippocrene in the West

where river sent candle lit wreaths 

first meet an incoming tide

first light ricochets from windowpanes 

dawn carpet-bombs skyscrapers ahead 

seen from the Staten Island ferry

Christine and Alan were there to see that sight 

before cancer took her away

where death still spills over

Michael March was there sipping espresso

in a coffee house courtyard mid-town Manhattan

Sami Al Banna lived in Butler Hall

Inderjit Badhwar and Shama

Virginia and Jimmy

she was there too

     playing piano in Barnard Hall

         a visitor from Philadelphia 

            H.C.

            but he did not know her then

                 or H.D.

when he stepped ashore, he’d come to New York

Bruce Choppin was there and John Hall

The Who performed Tommy at The Filmore East

when Donal lived in Northumberland

Bruce visited Roughside with Rachel

only a few did that

It was 1969

Gilbert Peaker got mugged on Morningside Heights

John Tukey with a bad back lay across desks 

at an IEA/UNESCO meeting

at Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Forrest Baskett was there from Stanford

Bruce brought together math guys     

statisticians     

computer scientists 

Donal who was a poet

before he was a programmer

for a mighty machine

IBM’s 360/91

Forrest said Assembly Language was too low level

impractical for IEA

he would choose to write FORTRAN

instead

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

When in Rome revisited

A Work in Progress 
6

 

 

The three men who ruled strode onto the dais

felon financier and famous for good fortune 

Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey the Great

we saw conjured

before our eyes slyly woven tissues of brazen lies

a new religion resisting definition

mass delusion manufactured by mercenaries

propelled through media 

by a man wanting to conquer Mars

standing next to a would-be Jupiter

an all-white triumvirate fostering fear

with fascist salutes

outrageous demands

a new kind of ism

many shades of truth

peddled by a felon financier and follower

not frightened of consequences when voters speak

intent on dictatorship

on imperial power

one mass produced bibles

acting as a god

another wanted Greenland given in gift

while the third ruled the Senate

distraction and deception ruled by rumor

popular people got paid for podcasts 

everything just a matter of opinion 

in a world where one of the nine 

slipped a trump card into the decision deck 

a get out of jail free card

for breaking the law what the heck

a reusable get-out-of-jail card

used to trump Jack Smith

overt legal power 

immunity

the shape of things to come

awake to the rule of kings

with divine right and then some

for lives can be made forfeit 

estates proscribed

just as was once described

by Sallust

in the time of Caesar’s adopted son

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025