The Dociles

 by Brett Rutherford

It was almost as if
they had been raised
among animals. Grunts
and nods, a finger pointed
toward an open mouth
requiring nourishment,

shivers and groans,
monosyllabic shouts
of want or warning
seem all they possess.

They walk among us,
not Homo habilis,
not Sapiens, not even
Neanderthal. Vessels
to fill with anything
the masters wish.

They go where ordered.
They pour themselves
into hats and uniforms.
If told to push, they push.
If given an axe or knife,
they figure out its use.

Flash a white light
into their dull eyes
and they stop and wait
for further orders,
whom to hate, and whom
to strike or kill.

No need for robots
or costly programs
apt to rebel or fail.
The Dociles beget
their own copies:
millions are here,
and millions more to come.

In the time ahead,
when the earth no longer
sustains the human horde
the masters will no longer
require their services
or yearn for their virgin daughters.

They all have guns. Turn one
against another and it is done.
The call will go
through TV antenna
to every trailer park.

As no one regrets
the crushed lantern fly,
none will miss them, either.

 

Cosmology

by Brett Rutherford

There was an instant
amid the blinding heat
of Chaos, when
the first proton popped
into existence. 

Later it met up
with the first electron
(more an enslavement
than a partnership
as it was doomed
to circle the proton
and never touch it.) 

This set
the cosmic matrix
and more came,
and more, and more,
each one as arrogant
as the first, each one
believing itself
first and foremost. 

Be certain:
atoms do not like
one another, repel
except where bound
by their dainty electrons,
whom they exchange
like worn-out mistresses. 

Not one of them
calls itself anything.
Nameless, inviolate,
eternal, invisible. 

Do not bow down
to cosmic monsters
made up of atoms only.
One is the same
as another.  

Not one of them cares
what you think of it.

 

The Goddess of Poverty

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Theognis, Elegaic Poems, 267-270

Take any floating thought.
Raise its first letter up.
Lo! Thought becomes
    a goddess, throned
    at the right hand of creation,
just as mere sunrise,
     an everyday event
becomes Dawn
     with rosy fingers.

What then of Poverty?
She is well-known enough.
The dictionary spells out
just who and what she is,
yet everyone you ask
says she is somewhere else.

She is nowhere worshiped
at the marketplace. Wall Street
falls silent at the mere utterance
of her name’s first syllable.
The court does not acknowledge her
though Justice meted out
seems corollary. Seek her
in dungeons or in debtors’ jails,
even among the desperate
who sleep beneath bridges,
in vain. Who has two shoes
and nothing else to cover
his nakedness says, “Ask him
with only one shoe what
Poverty is all about!”

No temple, no altar, not even
a single nub of a carving
with eyes the size
of sesame seeds
or a gaping, toothless hole
where hunger emanates —
she is a goddess of nothing,
a nullity.  Spinster, specter,
scorned everywhere, crone
of the averted eye, who
will raise up a shrine to her?

She takes the hand
of those who die unshriven.
Hers is the arm
on which one leans
on the road to Hades,
as the dead man looks back
to see the inheritors fight
over his left-behind treasures.
And she is there,
when the soul of one murdered
and secretly buried
arrives with no coin
for the somber boatman.
From her own purse
she offers one penny
to pay his passage.

She is the Goddess of “over there,”
the guardian of the town’s bad parts.
Her signs are the averted gaze,
the pointed finger.
There — See! Her face
among the crowd of immigrants
at the barbed-wire border.

If you have lived at all,
lived really and truly
you once, or more than once,
broke bread with her.

She merits an ode at least.

 

Milkweed Seeds

by Brett Rutherford

Cousins to carrion-flower,
and sisters to pitcher plants,
the milkweeds infest
front yards and weed-lots alike.
It is politically correct to plant them,
encourage them even,
because the idiot butterflies
are fond of them.

The air is full of milkweed seeds —
they fly, they light, they fly again —
they cling to leaf, to cat-paw,
dog fur and hedgehog quill.

Like wizened hags, burst out of pods,
white hair exploding on witch winds,
they trace the vectors of sinister air.

Do not mistake their innocent pallor:
this is not wedding-white, the purity
of drooping lilies.
The sour milk-sac that ejected them
is made of gossip, spite and discord.
Pluck this weed once, two take its place,
roots deep in the core of malice.

Seeds fall on sleepers who toss in misery.
They engender boils and bleeding sores.
These are no playful sprites of summer —
they go to make more of their kind —
and if one rides through an open window
it can get with child an unsuspecting virgin,
who, dying, gives birth to a murderer.

Just give them a wind
that’s upward and outward
and they’re off to the mountains
to worship that goat-head eminence,
pale lord of the unscalable crag,

Evil as white as blasted bone,
his corn-silk hair in dreadlocks,
his fangs a black obsidian
     sharp as scalpels,
his mockery complete
as every dust mote sings his praises.
The bare feet of witches use
milkweed as their carpet.  

Do not trust white,
as if it were winged
and ascending to heaven!
Beware, amid the bursting flowers,
the sinister pod!

Sociopaths

by Brett Rutherford 

     After Theognis, Elegaic Poems 149-154

I’ll tell you this, Cyrnus: some men
should never inherit a fortune.
Having too much breeds insolence.
What danger there is to everyone
when a bad man becomes a billionaire.
He will not mind his business, no:
he will ruin all to stand alone. 

Gold in the hand, a sieve
for a brain, a heart
the size of a chicken liver,
a wild boar’s temper.
Take from his small hands
the means to do others harm.
Before his evil, glaring eyes,
draw vertical lines: a cell.

Accusing Zeus

by Brett Rutherford

 

     From Theognis, Elegaic Poems 731-752

 

What kinds of beings, Father Zeus,

look on and laugh as men carouse

in wanton outrage, one on many,<

or many on one unwilling,

counting their sins as bank deposits;

what creatures unblinking nod

with approval at murder and carnage?

 

Titans and foul monsters, assuredly

rejoice in retributions

that roll on and on

up family tree, out branch,

fruit-rot and blossom poisonous —

but not the fair gods of Olympus!

 

Why, if the gods were at their stations,

is not the criminal struck down

by the lightning bolt

of his own foul act? Why curse

the sons of an unjust father,

who, bearing no one ill,

must bear his punishment

many times over? Look on,

O son of Kronos, at towns

where a thief escapes,

and, as a token, another is taken

and punished in his place.

 

Look down, of all the gods,

at the solitary cell

where one man languishes

for his father’s father’s crime.

Why does a just man,

free of transgression,

dreading to even say a word

against his fellows, sink

into subjection and punishment?

 

Does he whisper your name,

Olympian father, bewildered

that the wicked and wealthy lord

whose foot has never crossed

a temple’s threshold, should sit

in a mansion of gold and porphyry,

compiling a list

of his intended victims?

 

Why are the good worn down

to their graves by poverty? Why

is the Good not good enough

to share with those below?

 

 

The Beautiful People

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Theognis, Elegies, 15-18

O what a fête,
the union of Cadmus
and Harmonia! Down
from Mount Helicon flock
the Graces and Muses.
From high Olympus gods
invisible descend.
One line they sing
in common refrain:

Otti kalon philon esti,
to d’ou kalon ou
     philon esti.
The beautiful we love,
but from the plain
we turn our eyes away.

Cruel gods! Each guest
less fair in form
than the perfect groom
and his statuesque
bride, must wince
and go home downcast.

Bless’d by the gods
are the beautiful.
The others, plain,
or lame, or broken,
gap-toothed and riven
with skin less pure
than alabaster white,
must fend for themselves.

Fair ones, beware
the crows of envy!

 

 

Fire Is Not Easy

Coustou, statue of Vulcan/Hephaestus (Louvre Museum)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, 48

Why did mankind
in dark and cold endure
so many eons without fire?

Fire is no easy thing.
Rock does not yield it easily,
and zealous Zeus
strikes seldom where a blaze
survives the onslaught
of rain and hail that follow.

There was a time
before bronze, before
the metals coursed
like water in the smithy’s forge.

Once the Olympian father
had the thing in mind,
he had to make a personage
whose job it would be
to lord it over volcanoes,
and be the patron god
of weapons-makers.

Three hundred years it took
on top of Hera, laboring
at the sweaty act of love.
The cosmos shook as though
some vast machinery
of pistons and gears
warred with itself

in gasp and groan,
laughter and love-cry
until we got, full-grown,
and unapologetic for the pain
he caused his mother,
that sour grump god
they call Hephaestus.

 

 

The Argo Got Away

Lorenzo Costa, The Argo

 

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia 7, 19-21

Wronged men always
have gods on their sides.
Invoking ancestral blood
and the cities founded
by men of the same name,
they suppose Apollo,
or Zeus, or quick-to-ire
Poseidon, will aid them.

But the one with the Fleece,
the stolen daughter,
the rifled treasures
is far at sea already.
Do the same gods protect
the absconding lovers?
Do prayers from pretty things
outweigh the laments of princes?

Medea’s father breathes his last,
gasping on unfettered poison.
The Colchian ships sit idle,
limp and windless. The Argo,
rich in treason and betrayal
vanishes over the horizon.