Two Poems

by Kirby Olson (October 2020)

 


Fifth Avenue, New York, George Luks, 1920

 

 

Twin Towers

The golden tower of Trump,
standing at the SW corner of Central Park,
is a monument to Lockean capitalism.
The bathrooms are clean and open to the public.
Donald Trump is a champion of the Open Society.

So then why is he opposed to Muslim terrorists?
Why is he not for Open Borders?

Paul Tillich said, “Tolerance without
criteria, or intolerance without self-reflection,”

are the twin towers of erroneous judgment.

Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Democracy is a method
of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.”

 

Creation

Triceratops vanished after the comet hit the Yucatan.
Haman the Evil instigated genocide against the Israelites.
Christ demolished the money changers, and cleaned the coinage
symbolizing the new currency in the form of the Dove.
T. Rex would rend the lamb, and call it Easter Sunday.

The overleveraged Brontosaurus ate tons of vegetation,
while Christ implied we should live on mustard seeds,
the way the sparrows flit from branch to branch,
while televangelists roll by with red-corseted courtesans,
like cardinals in the Roman church pompously prating.

The heads of the money changers tumble into the tumbril.
Heads of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln,
Ulysses S. Grant, while Obama complains his face
is not on the currency, and Bill and Hillary Clinton
build a pyramid scheme.  The buck stops here,

says Trump.  He built a golden casino.
He built a golden skyscraper.
He promised a deal a real steal an art form
to unbalance the unscrupulous Chinese
while cities burned from Minneapolis to Aleppo.

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Kirby Olson is a tenured English professor at SUNY-Delhi in the western Catskills. His books include a novel (Temping), about an English professor who starts a circus in Finland; a book of poems entitled Christmas at Rockefeller Center

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast

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