Prague
Armies and ideologies rise and fall.
Your castle, churches, winding streets,
Your cobblestones have watched it all.
Wenceslas that good old King,
Then Charles built the castle wall. They knew:
Armies and ideas would rise and fall.
Medieval churches built by slaves,
Synagogues and Jewish graves.
Your cobbled streets have watched it all
Lone and slender Kafka, six feet tall,
Traversed those streets, an open nerve. He knew:
Ideologies and armies rise and fall.
Came the Nazis and Terezin
Where doomed children were huddled in.
Then Soviets in ’68 stayed until their fall.
Your cobbled bridges watched it all.
The sleep of years is sleeping still
Through troubled dreams that Kafka saw.
Armies and ideas rise and fall.
The cobblestones of Prague have watched it all.
At Dyke Marsh at Dusk in Fall
Walk out a crooked boardwalk,
Water slapping on the underplanks,
Walk out into this wetland marsh in Fall, its gilding grass and cattails
Tall as you or taller, see a careless, autumn moon
Strolling in the nimbus,
Its jangled brace of light is sprawled across
The field of grass. And further out, the river
Idles in the dark and on the other bank
Somewhere north behind the trees
A city’s shrieking in its capitol teeth.
One hundred years ago or less
Or more when time was inessential,
As the moon just slipped behind that cloud
So water overcame the bank
And inundated land, and water,
Grass and foliage conspired
To form this wetland marsh
For pickerelweed and Orioles,
Beavers, black duck and Arrow Arum,
Swamp shrub, osprey, wrens,
For pumpkin ash,
Sparrows, spatterdock and cattails
That graze the breeze at night in fall.
You might wish to be wanted there,
For the night to tell you its secrets,
For the moonlight to gather up into itself
The form of a girl you might once have loved
Who walks into the shallows and
Out of her dress
And waits for you there in the shadows and grasses
But just like that it’s gone again,
The moon, behind a bank of coming winter sky,
As if she turned her back on you.
Whatever glory there is
In water, reeds, cattails, sky,
Implacable sky,
Conceals itself as in a shawl,
Shuts you out, shares nothing at all
Says nothing to you at the Dyke Marsh at dusk in fall.
From the Amtrak
It is, perhaps, what you would expect to see
From an Amtrak ratcheting through the Jersey outback
Before a scrap metal yard.
But you will blink once before you are aware
It is cars you are looking at,
Pressed into the beyond,
Into the shape of things to come,
Flat as the sun and stacked like dented cards.
There’s one to the side still whole,
Waiting wheel-less, doom in its parts, for the big hammer,
Looking a bit like the Dodge you drove
The one you cursed, though it carried you there and back.
Can it be grief you feel for this machinery,
Shed like a chrome and metal mold of your heart?
But you are well on your way to another place,
In another state, when it seizes you unaware
That you are always being stripped like gears
And will be
Forever slipped free of your armor like skins,
Of all your machinations,
Loosed one by one of your devises,
Until you leave the free way,
The pistons of your own naked engine driving you home.
Mark Moran is a professional writer based in Washington, D.C. Born in the D.C. area, Mark has also lived in Chicago and Cleveland, Ohio. A graduate of Dickinson College, class of 1983, has worked his entire career as a journalist. Now approaching retirement, he looks forward to devoting more time to crafting personal essays and poetry.
Cover photo: Tommy Grevlos
