You will (as sometimes
\npeople say)
\nlaugh; you will (as clairvoyants
\nsay) roar with laughter, gentlemen\u2014
\nbut, word of honor,
\nI have a crony,
\nwho
\nwould be thrilled to shake hands
\nwith the head of a state or of any other
\nenterprise.<\/p>\n
Since when, I wonder,
\nin the pit of the stomach
\nwe\u2019ve begun to experience a tender
\nbubbling, when looking through an opera glass
\nat the burly one, bristly haired, in the grand box?
\nSince when the concept
\nof authority has been equated
\nwith the seminal notion of patria?<\/p>\n
All sorts of Romans and butchers;
\nCharles the Handsome and Charles the Hideous;
\nutterly rotten princelings; fat-breasted
\nGerman ladies; and various
\ncannibals, loverboys, lumbermen,
\nJohns, Lewises, Lenins,
\nemitting stool grunts of strain and release,
\npropping elbows on knees,
\nsat on their massive old thrones.
\nThe historian dies of sheer boredom:
\nOn the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
\nDoes our plight really force us to do
\nwhat did bureaucratic Cathay
\nthat with heaps of superfluous centuries
\naugmented her limited history
\n(which, however, hardly became
\neither better or merrier)?<\/p>\n
Per contra, the coachmen of empires look good
\nwhen performing their duties: swiftly
\ntoward them flies the blue of the sky;
\ntheir flame-colored sleeves clap in the wind;
\nthe foreign observer looks on and sees
\nin front bulging eyes of great beauty
\nand behind a beautiful blend
\nof divan cushion and monstrous pumpkin.
\nBut the decorated big fellow or else
\nthe trench-coated wolf
\nin his army cap with a German steep peak,
\nhoarse-voiced, his face all distorted,
\nspeaking from an immobile convertible,
\nor, again, a banquet
\nwith Caucasian wine.
\nNo, thank you.<\/p>\n
If my late namesake,
\nwho used to write verse, in rank
\nand in file, at the very dawn
\nof the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
\nhad lived till its noon
\nhe would be now finding taut rhymes
\nsuch as \u201cpraline\u201d
\nor \u201cair chill,\u201d
\nand others of the same kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You will (as sometimes people say) laugh; you will (as clairvoyants say) roar with laughter, gentlemen\u2014 but, word of honor, I have a crony, who would be thrilled to shake hands with the head of a state or of any other enterprise. Since when, I wonder, in the pit of the stomach we\u2019ve begun to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}