Latest poems by Eugene Schlanger, The Wall Street Poet

Latest poems by Eugene Schlanger, the author of September 11 Wall Street Sonnets (Paris 2006).

September 12, 2008
“To believe in the heroic makes heroes.” Disraeli

1.

An old sailor disembarks
From a tour bus parked
Adjacent to Ground Zero.
His worn cap identifies
An American vessel of war
From another confrontation.
The sailor’s legs buckle
As he slowly descends
The well-worn steps.
His loose translucent skin reflects
Another crisp September morning.

Early-risen tourists chew breakfast bars.
Unlicensed sellers do a brisk business
In glossy photographs of death.
Nearby, new columns arise
That will anchor our monuments
To mourning and despair.

2.

How odd for Americans
To continue to identify themselves
As united in anguish—as victims—
Claiming especial treatment from
Ineffective governments.

The sailor is silent.
There’s nothing to see
Nor much to say.
This is where the political class
Turned again to the common man
In uniform.

3.

We may not need nine despondent acres
Nor clusters of empty towers
To honor the dead of September 11.
A replica of either small statue
At Lexington or Concord
May be all that is necessary.

We are a nation of individuals
Whose fortitude and valor
Need not be
Continuously
Rebroadcast.

4.

One day your children’s children
Will walk north along Broadway,
From the Battery, past Wall Street—
Past Alexander Hamilton, still
Quietly entombed at Trinity Church,
And the descendants of Whitman and Melville,
Of E.B. White and Murray Kempton,
Of Scorsese and Lee, each busy recording
The vitality of this port, arisen anew again.
You and I will live forever.

© Copyright Eugene Schlanger, 2009 - All Rights Reserved - Tous droits réservés

Summer Ale (Hanover Square, July 2008)

Fast Sam Adams laughter
Reverberates through Harry’s
At the government’s insistence
That it can trace and displace rumors
Or measure credit derivatives.
Have the business schools produced
The most morbid and inept
Cheerless executives
In this short crisis?

Tourists continue to perspire
Along the perimeter
Of Ground Zero.
Incapable or unable,
They do not see or hear
The ghosts suspended
Above Tobin Plaza,
The Court of International Trade,
Always about to splatter
On rookies, chiefs and a priest
Staring up in disbelief.

Instructed to shop
By the first MBA president,
Those who are not New Yorkers
Herd towards Century 21
And emerge moist and ravenous.

Shamans once dispatched warriors
To the Underworld
To free the maimed and the dead
Of their dying civilizations.
We lease.

After another draft,
Some casual remarks and a casual caress,
My colleague from Deutsche Bank
Finally laughs.
At last, the mayhem—
Of falling towers, broken levees and
Continuous crimes committed by
The drug-addled underclass—
Gives way to Johan Santana’s
First complete game at Shea.

Short the ultra-short ETFs and
Watch millions reappear intraday.
Magic. Levity.
Fueling another round
In this swell town.

The Freedom Tower

Long after Schumer, Clinton and Pataki
Are relegated to storage, their images
Yellowed and curled like old site maps,
Others may continue to chatter about
The Freedom Tower as a symbol of
Urban and national resistance to terror.
I would sooner trust the judgment of
My fellow New Yorkers: None would work
Anywhere near that plated fixation—
1776 feet of dire steel, glass and concrete;
As if New York needed to reassure
The Baathists, Bedouin, French or Germans
That we live in the center of the universe
At the apex of all known civilizations.

The Negro’s Civil War
(for Sean Bell)

The focus, of course, is on Colonel Shaw
Buried in the ditch before Battery Wagner
With his slaughtered Negro soldiers.
The Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had suffered
More losses than the Confederacy
That fateful fiery morning.
Loss always seems to come
With a sunrise to remember.
The Comedian wills everything.

The mad Brahmin poet Robert Lowell
(Perhaps the best and the brightest
Of the last half-century)
Re-reported the loss.
Many were urged onto Boston Common,
Opposite the old Statehouse,
Towards Saint Gaudens’ bas-relief
Of Shaw and his gaunt soldiers.

Art is a wondrous concession
To those prescient illustrious Fools
Buried at Copps Hill and along
The estuaries that once fed these
Nieuw cities of fire and brimstone
And lumbering merchants.

Later, a film, Glory, also returned
To that first Negro regiment
Recruited in the North:
Soldiers (and their lily officers)
Paid unequal wages, expended
(Some suggest) in South Carolina
To shore up support for the war.

Historians press primary documents
For evidence of their understanding.
I hear the slaughter of Negros in the North:
Christians hunting other Christians.
A fusillade still pouring upon the sons
Of Douglas and Washington.

© Copyright Eugene Schlanger, 2008 - All Rights Reserved - Tous droits réservés