Thursday, December 27, 2012

Not to be Forgotten

photographer unknown


Attended, last evening, an event to honor my friend, poet laureate, and exemplary human, Bruce Dethlefsen.  Wrote this little piece for the gathering::

Forgotten
after Bruce Dethlefsen
on the conclusion of his term
as Wisconsin Poet Laureate

I forget each street by street
each road by road
your purple truck
cross-hatching
Cross Plains to Crivitz.
The joys and pains.
As if it’s out of mind, now
your Wisconsin
cow by cow
their black and white.
I forget each day of days
the Champagne flight
of word by word
that tomato
that celebrated spread of mayonnaise
all gone again.
Each morning, each memory
flying bird by bird.
There, totally forgotten
the life by life
turned poem by poem.
Your laureate, bardic ways.

italicized lines stolen from Bruce Dethlefsen,
and herein returned by           Ralph Murre

Friday, December 14, 2012

Monday, December 10, 2012

The Times



Thinking of ordering a 2013 calendar, and I'm just wondering -- how did people know they were in the Middle Ages?  And how do we know we're not?  Of course, if the world ends on December 21st, or whenever it's supposed to end this time, that will clear that up, and these will certainly NOT have been the Middle Ages. I'm putting off most of my Christmas shopping, just in case.

It was easy enough, I suppose, to realize if you were in an Ice Age, and the Dark Ages? well, duh . . . nobody ever paid utility bills!  But precisely where you stood BC had to be a tricky calculation. And these people of the Middle Ages must have been far more advanced in their knowledge of the Big Picture than we give them credit for.  I have to double-check that this is a Monday.

None of this, of course, addresses post-modern architecture. The melting time-pieces of Dali.

~ RM