A Hard Night’s Day

by Julian Alper (July 2026)

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3:30am
After Marc Chagall’s The Poet, or Half-Past Three
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It’s half past three in the morning
long after the time he should have been
in bed recharging his hyperboles.
Sipping sapid forty-five proof caffeine
to remain afloat
the blue and once-white stripes
of his suit-like jim-jams
half-rhyme with his red and
off-white tablecloth.
His half full, half empty
wine bottle at forty-five degrees
is literally begging to be glugged from
onomatopoeically
like Alice’s drink-me bottle.
Notebook to hand
he’s toiling to find the perfect imagery
as he rummages through his word palette
a veritable thesaurus of colourful metaphors.
His bottle-green head—anaphorically reflecting
his bottle-green cat affectionately licking him—
is spinning in a whirring blur of assonance.
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And so it is for all poets—
an inverse head is the norm
in the downside-up world of reality.
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Same day, 3:30pm
After Marc Chagall’s The Poet Reclining
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It’s half past three in the afternoon
long after the time he should have been
up and about.
But he was totally drained of rhythm
following a serious night of musing.
Pallid face
yet feeling blue like his blouson,
head on his palette
yet in the clouds—
dreaming through the day.
Not enough oomph in his synonym store
to substitute a simile for a grin
or a smile for a metaphor.
Averse to rising for fear of falling
over the edge of
an enjambment
he preferred to chill horizontally
in the warmth
by the browning evergreen
enjoying the grass
oblivious to the horse put out to pasture
and the pig out of its poke.
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He hummed to himself
in a Pythonesque sort of way:
Oh, I′m a poet, and I′m okay
I work all night and I sleep all day.
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And he said to himself
in a way that many folk
consider paranormal
or perhaps even meta poetic:
I must tell the poet of this poem
that his ending is a perfect example of
a paraprosdokian.
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The Goldfinch
After The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius
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The forlorn jailed bird was taciturn
as he hopped on his stage
tethered by his foot to bars
with a short golden fetter.
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His gold and fiery-red plumage
dulled by captivity,
his melodious warbling
muted by prison walls,
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he turned his face gently away from Fabritius
unable to look at those melancholy eyes
harbingers of the unfortunate painter’s
impending demise.
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Summer Holiday History
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A bookcase full of photo albums with covers of dust
and decaying labels revealing year and location
it’s a pictorial family history.
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60s and 70s in monochrome
there was London in full swing
the free and easy minimalistic fashion
sightseeing with hip, hop-on hop-off topless buses—
patriotically standing outside the Palace
peering at the balcony where the King and Queen
and Princesses saluted the public on VE day
and shedding a tear at the Cenotaph for “The Glorious Dead”
the Imperial War Museum with the Churchill War Rooms
and on to the south coast, ice cream cornets, no longer rationed
and building sandcastles, “We’ll fight them on the beaches”
Oxford with the river, the colleges, dons and students, and
more tears at St. Martin’s Churchyard at Bladon
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, 1874-1965
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”.
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Fading colours from the 80s and 90s, venturing further afield
ferry to Northern France, and yet more tears at the battlefields,
the fields of death, the lovingly landscaped military cemeteries
young men six feet under who should by then have been in their prime
“When you go home, tell them of us and say,
for your tomorrow we gave our today”
tears in Amsterdam at Anne Frank’s house
“I want to go on living even after my death”
and tears in Dunkirk— “This was their finest hour”.
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Next shelf, the naughties, digital photos
self-printed on home printers
Mussolini’s Rome and a few days in Paris—
just six weeks the French survived the German onslaught—
Budapest and tears for the Shoes on the Danube Bank
Prague, overrun by Germany in ‘38 and the Soviets in ‘68
and Wenceslas Square marking the fall of an Empire
a brief walk in the Black Forest—
I, a 21^st Century Jew, walked on Hitler’s land.
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And then no more, not a single album
the rest is Facebook history.
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