The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Ray Greenblatt serve as the inaugural Mad Poet of the Year for 2021.
SPACE AND TIME
by Ray Greenblatt
SPACE I
He sits at a metal table
trying to imagine
mesons at play in the box
dreaming of things so miniscule
and unpredictable
beside the plasticized salami-on-rye,
then he mounts the steel circular stairs
tartan scarf flying
cracked briar puffing
rings round his cranium
in frosted air,
the dome begins to split
like God’s eye opening
or a monster’s maw yawning
while he squints through the telescope
at helixed galaxies
brown dwarves, imagining
gravitational tides, black holes.
SPACE II
The wall stands thick and tall
with bunkers and pillboxes
every few yards.
Sentries stare down
at the long valley
where mountain slopes are still umber
even shadows the shade of ashes
even though it’s fecund spring.
The females are distinguished from males
only by the way their contoured hair
flips out from under the helmets.
The young soldiers giggle together
now passing cigarettes and whispers
sometimes asleep while at attention.
Longitude merely stops at the Pole,
they stand on a parallel which turns
round and round the world,
degrees measured to the enth
invisible beneath their feet.
TIME I
Starter’s gun glistens and sparks,
cinders kicking up
and nipping like no-see-ums
heat but a shrug
opponents phantoms,
as she traces her ovate route
past the sand pit
stacked hurdles
row of 12-pound shots
all milestones,
javelins stuck in the ground
as those flung by Achilles
against Trojan walls—
then before her
in the final stretch
a band of fog above the brook
a white tape along the horizon.
TIME II
Calendar pages flip
as if caught in a dirty breeze,
he has become a legal autodidact
an unofficial barrister
(he knows that word too).
No longer necessary to chew
the chip of balsa wood,
listen to sighs down the hall,
reread news clippings
about the murdered family.
But all the TV’s, computers, iPods
don’t add up to jack.
He can feel the vaulted corridor
with dim recessed lights
gray damp stone
doors clanking shut
odor of baking or a roast.
His epitaph: Monday, 8 A.M.
the eternal day.
Space and time can be relative, as Einstein posited; space and time can be eternal, as seen in an observatory. However, at the other end of the spectrum, a certain space—say, crossing a nation’s border—can mean war or peace. And a split second can mean the win or loss of a race—or life.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.