Hegel interrupted again
By the incessant reporter of history
Sir! Your ideas on balanced government??
I got them from the guy from Braintree
Hegel smiled
The guy with a “Cause”
[John Adams
[Editor’s note: “the Cause” means The American Revolution]
Impetuous stout
And married to maiden of liberty
Abigail Smith
Lived somewhere near Boston
Abigail Adams
Who questioned the absence of women
In the American Constitution
Whatever
Girl with a Cause
We won’t even talk about why
Hegel in the Phenomenology
Featured the battle between
Master and Slave
Nor why DuBois
Would make it Hegel’s masterpiece
His masterpiece
Souls of Black Folk
Twenty percent of the American population
Black and enslaved
At the time
Workers in leather aprons
Of W/E colo/ur
Excluded from the vote
Single women hold property
Married women
Do not
Taxation without representation
Property qualification honey
Where you will never be mine
But otherwise a perfect republic
And even better
Democracy
That’s why RFK
Took it in the back of the ear
In Los Angeles
To end the war
[Editor’s note: should not you as a poet
[STFU at this point??]
To end all wars
I mean the French
Handed America
Dien Bien Phu
And the British at Trafalgar
Kingston Trio
The MTA
Gave up the Far East
In the Suez Crisis
To America
And finished it off
With 9-11
[Editor:Wrestled Down by Another Editor:
[Surely you don’t mean
[LIHOP know it but let it happen
[Or a blow from history
[At the solar plexus]
Poet taken out to the firing squad
Relieved to be understood
by someone
even the hostile state
Never mind the cigarette
Give me the blindfold
Every time
My point in this poem
Poetry as Conspiracy Theory
Is it worth
To suffer it
As to
Get over it
Theory as Poetry
Is to
“Mind the Gap!”
As they say in the Tube
[Police Note: poet rustled off at this point]
London Underground
The shadows in late summer
Stretch away from the sun
Me and Donald MacRae
At the LSE
With Mick Jagger
Getting poetic here
Right in the heart
I include in this poem
A rough photograph
Of late summer
In the neighbourhood
[Editor’s Note: get to the point]
You know
It’s always from out of the blue
Your father strikes you
Songs for my father
Paul Robeson
Right in the heart
Al Jolson
Both forbidden now
Cheap advertisement
For liberty
Mom: eyes wide open
David you are throwing
Your own theories into your evidence
Dad with a wry smile
Eyes wide shut
DAVID INTERRUPTED
I think it was when Buddy died
Me and my cousin
Keith
Desolate in frozen Ottawa
Searching for a reason
All three had to go
Starting with Ritchie Valens
Ending with Big Bopper
I had already not gotten over
When they sold my favo/urite
Team
The Brooklyn Dodgers
Broken hearted in Ottawa
Almost the final rupture
With organized sport
I mean the Rosenbergs
Dad listening to Paul Robeson
At the border
Soured me for popular politics
So why I am writing in love with America
Especially with McCarthy
Reds under the bed
Tho in my case
Infamously
Tim Buck
Leader of the Communist Party of Canada
Slept in my bed
Honey
Hegel interrupted
From his remembrance
Of professional baseball
At Lord Lansdowne Park
My dad and I
The crack of the bat
In the late summer twilight
Is it always about Linda Broom
Ernest and loving
The girl who loved me without question
That I left behind
Or not even noticed a pause between stops
She running after me in the streetcar
Her I rejected
Totally
Asking myself now why
All the escapades of history
Should escape my simple life
Except that of
Linda Broom
Chasing me
Ernest
Importance of being Ernest
My dad loved America
A common affliction
In Ottawa
So many undergrounds lead to
Lansdowne Park
By the Driveway unto the way
To Parliament Hill
The armoured vehicles passing me
On my way to work
In my new Fiat Spyder white convertible
Canada’s October Crisis
I was one of those drunken public servants
Who could figure out for you
In a second
The lay of the universe
Now no longer needed
Power had taken off
Aldo Moro and Pierre Laporte
Somebody switched off the lights
Green sedans
In Massachusetts the other Kennedy
Killed in an airplane crash
Who George shall not mention
Think about it
look at this clip
Of Pierre Eliot Trudeau
Maybe one of the best clips in history
Even I can’t figure it out
In the midst of an apparent attempt to
Overthrow his government
Pierre Eliot Trudeau is asked
How far will you go
To stop the terrorists?
just watch me
Said Trudeau
A parallel power
to overthrow
The elected representatives
Of the people
Thank you Larisa and Stanley for commenting on my poem. I appreciate very much both of your comments on my poetry, and I learn from them, though my efforts to improve may not be satisfactory. Last night's poem derives from a difficult transition in my book where I am setting Hegel's education as a young person in the context of the American Revolution. John Adams and Abigail Adams come into this context. And to make it more complicated, I am setting this dualism against my own philosophical education. So the poem is complicated. I often use poetry to help me envision in advance discussions in my book in progress. The American Revolution shook the world, and had a huge impact on Hegel, who was six years old in 1776 and 19 when George Washington became president. In other words, he grew up with a most amazing world transformation
History and poetry are best understood up close.