Seven Ways Autumn Goose

photoart: ralph murre

Seven Ways Autumn Goose

by Martha Kaplan

the wings of the winter goose

are like the heartbeat

of a frightened squirrel

the goose calls alone

the arrow is pierced

the goose carves the sky

its breasts fold open

the airplane flies careless arcs

the goose hears the laughing man

her eye watches

the dog howls across

the goose in flight

the goose falls straight

the marsh grass is trampled

a stone meets water

like the iris of the goose

the circles extend

~ first published (in slightly different form)

   in Branch Redd Review

Giverny

artwork: katsushika hokusai (the metropolitan museum of art)

Giverny

by Martha Kaplan

The gardens beautiful without a doubt

and so the crowds throng

passing through the not quite Japanese garden

along the path and over the bridge,

pausing there to gaze long at the water lilies,

imagining those icons made famous

by the painter’s hands, they contemplate the color

of sky and clouds shimmering in the pond,

they move then through the shadowed trees,

along the cindered path opening bright and wide

into the cottage gardens, full floral, with

lavender borders, hollyhocks in high

color, roses everywhere on green lattices,

momentarily, they sit, benched, by the borders,

holding guidebooks,

or huddled on the steps, journaling.

Rested, they pass into the pink house framed in green

shutters, ivy and white roses climbing its walls,

they shoulder from room to room

peering closely at imitations

of the great painter’s works:

crowds of French, crowds of Americans,

crowds of Germans, Italians, Greeks, Czechs, and Yugoslavs

British, Spanish, Scots, Belgians, and Dutch,

Latinos and Latinas, even Solomon Islanders, and Japanese

flowers of all sorts pass through the blue

and yellow kitchen, the bedrooms, and windowed study,

they celebrate the house, examining every detail,

and yet they fail to pause for the art that moved the painter’s eye,

an inspiration, the clearest lines and the bluest blues on every wall:

The Wave, A Thousand Views Along the Tokaido Road—

still slightly creased, as if just lifted from the packing boxes

of precious porcelain.

~ first published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine

An Immodest Proposal

artwork: ralph murre

An Immodest Proposal

by Martha Kaplan

Let us now fire all immigrants

Too many work to prepare the food we eat

To slaughter the meat

To truck the meat to market

To harvest in the fields from dark to dark

Too many slave in conditions we choose not to see

Let us now fire them all

And feed ourselves the sludge and slime that we create

Let us free the rivers that we have dammed until no

Rivers flow below our borders

Too many work for wages far below our own

Or none, to build our ticky-tack houses from sun to sun

Our skyscrapers high on desert floors

To trim our elegant trees, or clean our floors, bent

Knees before our un-flushed latrines

Too many kiss and hug, and feed and comfort,

Our offspring in schools too dear for them to afford,

And let us fire all those who have finished soldiering

For us in all our foreign wars

Let us now fire all immigrants

Let us also send back those children of immigrants

Born here among us, though citizens, they clearly do not

Belong, their languages too melodic to the ear,

Their food too varied, too unlike the meatloaf of cows

Raised on evil corn, the night-Trojan horse,

Eater of prairie soil, let us send back all who come

Without influence and power to this blood soil,

These high mountains, our ocean shores, and let us

Extend this principle of exclusion

To all the generations of those who have come

from outside these borders,

To those whose children ate the trees

extending from sea to sea,

And blew away the twelve feet deep soil, the work

of millennia,

And who sing of purple mountains beautiful

And golden waves of grass as if the few

Hundred years of residency despoiling this place

grants them grace

Send them back across the seas,

Give back the land to those here first,

Those these newcomers call “new,” and I too

Will wave from the boat sending me back

To the killing fields of Europe

~ first published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine