What Can One Do?

by Brett Rutherford

What can one do against the tide of war?
For starters, one can write a thousand poems.
If soldiers stopped to write, each his epic,
there would be no need for bloody battles
as all the small deaths of The Iliad
are told again and anew in poems;
if sailors lay back in hammocks languidly
and counted out sonnet beats on fingers,
sleek submarines would stall, submerging not
nor even leaving their darkened harbors;
if the Seals and Marines were tasked with Greek,
to translate Anakreon’s erotics,
the boy-crazed sighing of Petronius,
or the athletic odes of high Pindar,
then verses they wrote would work themselves out
in indolent acts of one-another-
worship, the weapons all quite forgotten.

If everyone wrote each a thousand poems
there would be no time for conspiracies,
and the deer would go unkilled, the students
unmurdered in their high-school classrooms, all
manner of crimes would be but sublimate
inside poetic narratives of strife.
Each to her own Utopia, the dreamers
take to pen and keyboard — no one is slain
to prove a finer point of cold theory.

Blank verse? Free-verse? Epic? It matters not.
Saga or ballad or lordly sonnet?
Any will do. Get on with it. Send all
to your dull senators and congressmen;
dare them to answer you only in verse.

My manifesto made, my duty done.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go!

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.