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| Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
The first two poets I read and loved were Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson; I'd bought, in paperback, a volume's worth of each at the little newsstand/book rack that stood in the hallway outside the Mess Hall at Camp Muenchweiler in Germany. I don't remember exactly in which other book I came across "Sometime During Eternity ..." by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; probably in a paperback anthology of "beat" writing which I also bought in the hallway.
I was blown away by the iconoclasm as well as the shape of the poem; the synapses in my mind did some push-ups and some jumping jacks; its horizon expanded; the images of crucifixion I'd looked upon at Sacred Heart Church on so many forlorn Sunday mornings throughout my growing-up years now had a different, if no less pitiful, cast to them.
Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You’re hot
they tell him
And they cool him
They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it
Only he don’t come down
from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti can step out of the bookstore, walk a few paces to Jack Kerouac Alley, and contemplate a memorial that has been set in his honor.
Besides being a great poet, Ferlinghetti is also notable for having co-founded one of the world's most famous bookstores, City Lights in San Francisco. If I've been to San Francisco seven or eight times then I've been to City Lights seven or eight times, sometimes with a cigarette dangling from my lips.
Well now, happy birthday Lawrence! Oh, golly gosh Geo, there would have been a time I'd have been shocked to my socks reading that poem...my beginnings were Catholic Catholic Catholic...forlorn Sunday mornings you write...mine were each and every morn..oh maybe not forlorn..maybe roboticish..
ReplyDeleteAm loving the memorial!
thanks for this Mr Ferlinghetti:
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity