"And Ye Would Not!"

I

"So, what now?" he asked
Deep worry on his royal brow.
"We attack," his man replied.
"We make swords out of our plows."
The king's weary eyes lost their gleam.
"Do you –" he stuttered.
"Do you know what this means?"

If they had really known
The wretched treefall of their deeds
Those bitter seeds they'd not have sown.
Their corpses would not litter
Fields of battle then unknown.
But they knew it not.

So with just one week to muster
And without any time to train
Their grand army hobbled out into the rain
Sloshing where no foot would fall again.
But one county distant
Trod others – rebels, brothers, kin –
Wondering as well upon the fratricidal sin.
But though they misgave, and so the king,
No one was yet halting
The madness of a body turned on its own members.
Why not?
No one remembers.

II

At the field of battle by the river
Amidst winter's ceaseless snows
On the ridge above they arrayed their knights,
Near the bridge they placed their longbows.
The king's army thus in all its might
Faced their rebel brothers.

The arrows like apocalyptic hail
Fell on both sides and hell-
Like was combat betwixt cousins
Whose same blood steamed the icy field.
But the king yielded the ground 'fore the sun setted –
A rout. As they crushed to the bridge
Ten thousand men fell in the river,
Wettened with the chill of death.

They found the king washed up on the ice
Like some nameless squire.
They burned him like a pagan in a pyre.
And the old duke, the rebels' leader, fell
By an unknown assailant's arrow
Lifeless to earth.

The narrow chance for peace
Ceased with those two souls
For the new regent and duke
Were alike cold.
"The old were lucky to have died,"
A Father muttered at his monastery nearby,
"For they remembered, if but faintly,
They were brothers.
But these would sell their own mothers
Into bondage."

Calloused grew the nation,
Its women and its men.
Even its roosters crowed with different ken.
If the Father knew the bitterness it would unleash
He would have held his peace
And not done as he then did.
But he knew it not.

So at next lowing of the cattle
And next clucking of the hens,
Knowing that all the Brothers in near country
Would do as he requested them,
He called up his men.

The bells rang from ev'ry belfry.
The monks trooped in from all around
At the frightened note in that fell, copper-coated sound.
Quarterstaves and quivers,
Chuckles, shivers,
They heeded the call.

They gathered there to train
Until the conflict reawakened.
With each joust and each skirmish
They grew more determined
That, though it bring great violence,
Though the battles wax right sore,
They would stop the wicked war.

III

The gate of spring unlatched at last,
On the green and hilly countryside
Perennial resurrection stampeded forth,
Thrushes and terns atwitter at the perfection
Of their delicious winter naps.

"What better weather for a chevauchée
Against our dear friends of the kingdom?"
The new duke bid his armor on him
As he yammered at his servant.
"Though yet-green fields will not burn,
It ought to be worth some
Fifteen thousand weight of gold
In plunder. That's quite a sum to earn," he laughed.
"Lord Regent, you are free to hate me,
But be sure to watch and learn!"

Like a frothing wave tumbling mindless
Upon the salty rock
The duke's army slammed and spilt and swarmed
Around the regent's capitol,
Whose walls were arrogant in ashen gray.
The day ended as orange light fell
And subtle sleet cooled still-hot heads.
That same night they started
A quaking bombardment that endured
For what seemed a Lent of days.

Each morning, siege ladders lurched upon the wall
With the weary sun's first rays.
The duke's men piled over battlements,
A hundred slain
For each defender they slew.

And the regent's cavalry
Barreling from the castle each afternoon
Unleashed obscene carnage
On the duke's army.

But one morning as the ladders rose
And matters seemed to carry on,
A low, dark cloud on the horizon
Lingered with the dawn.
Lingered and then drifted
Down to the battlefield
Until scouring daylight
Unveiled a monkish army.

The duke's forces turned them round,
To see the perilous faces
Of the Father's men charging
Upon them. No more siege-lethargic,
Screams supplanted yawns.

The regent was exultant and
Sent his men to join the fray,
Vowing canonize the fighting Father on that day.

But the warlike monks knew no regent's honor
For they'd come to end the mutual slaughter
E'en if they had to throw
Their own souls into the barter.

So three armies there did battle
Outside the castle walls,
A thrashing human mass, a self-destroying thrall.

Till all fell silent at that bitter end,
The stench of blood, of dead horses and rotting men
Stagnating with the lack of wind.

But the reek afloat was perfume
Compared to the reek within the heart,
The anguish of a man who'd finished
What he could never now unstart.

Like a ghost the Father floated
Past the corpses in their piles
Wading through the bloody, grassy aisles.

The ignominy of his deed came as a tremor to his hands.
He closed his eyes,
The permanency of his crime
Dispiriting his lower lip
With pathetic tremble.

The holy man collapsed,
Bowing low on blood-soaked knees
And the mourning cry of death entered
His self-damnatious pleas.
He bowed his face to a nearby corpse,
Breathing in its cooling blood,
And cried, "'Jerusalem, Jerusalem!'
Oh God, what have I done!"

The Poet's Trap

I must avoid becoming a cliché poet.
Not just the use of cliché phrases
Do I fear
But a cliché mode
Cliché thought
Cliché meaning that has ever been meaned
In a thousand different wrappers,
Recognizably, uniformly unlike.

To use the 'in' style
Is saying
I need the praise of poets
Who despise me.
My poetry hasn't beauty enough
To be sung freely
But demands the trusted testimonial
Of sounding like, feeling like, thinking like
Those great ones in Bloom's anthology.

I know I probably stink
At this poetry thing,
Am just a washed up, regurgitated Tennyson
Without achieving his mastery,
And all this is a self-justification
To go on stinking,
To muddle on mediocrely.
And when, thirty years after my death
They find my unpublished works in a briefcase somewhere
Screaming out for breath, to be known and read and
Lived,
They'll know this
And will feed The Complete Works of Josh Hansen
To the shredder, then the recycle bin,
To be mashed and slopped and reconstituted
As a forty-percent post-consumer content
Drink holder
For some burger chain,
Where a child will sit, eating
Grease-steeped potatoes
Not knowing how close he came
To suffering the irrevocable damage of
Bad Poetry.

Yes, that's what they'll do
And let them do it
If that's the price
Of saying, doing, sounding,
Being
Different Poetry.
Yes, let them do it.
And now I fade
With my meanings perhaps as-yet unmeaned
Into significant
Insignificance.

Princess Di: age 7

A galloping child
knows nothing of guile
head crowned with golden flowers

Holes in the knees
of hand-me-down jeans
escaping the evil king's powers

She's frightened and still
she sprints down the hill
Eyes wide and breath short with excitement

The horses draw near
but the prince she can hear
to save her, much to her delightment

She climbs up a tree
from there she can see
him slaying the guards all around

The king runs away
Her prince saved the day!
He helps her back down to the ground

But now it gets dark
The forest's a park
Her playtime and daydreams are done

Thanking her friend*
for the fairy tale end
she goes home to sleep with the sun

*This friend (the prince) is intended to be imaginary.

Exit Strategy

Doorway gleaming white, with a knob of brass,
Whither fly the paths that through thee pass?
Do they run through barley fields between the furrows
Or pave into yonder city's hurried boroughs?

You wait silent, but then some footsteps wake you --
Some traveler seeking a sure way through
To a world where stand waiting a thousand gateways more:
Small doors for cupboards, tall doors stretching from roof to floor.

Your kindred in the world at large have not
All as benign a purpose as you have got,
For doors of bars compel the pris'ners stay
And doors of wood invite men to their graves.

Yet I am glad, on the whole, for you hingéd portals
That, even imprisoning, or enclosing former mortals,
Remind us of what we must never cease to know:
That there are doors, because there's somewhere to go.

A poem describing how it feels to go take a test as late as you possibly can without preparing much before hand.

Hepe. Not happy.
Please don't confuse the two.
No trace of mirth is on my face:
I don't know what to choose!

For "A" seems reasonable I s'pose,
But "B" could also be true,
And "C" has words I can't define.
I haven't got a clue.

I tightly squeeze my tired eyes
And hear the clock race on.
No inspiration to my mind.
I stifle my tenth yawn.

Filling in my last best guess,
I race back down the stairs
And give no glance to that crude screen.
It's Hepe, man. Who cares?

Blank Lines

Much is made of
reading between the lines,
hearing what isn't said,
pulling meaning from the spaces
between words.

But the meaning is not in the blank,
the nothing,
the empty.

Take a page devoid of writing,
a room without a speaker.
They are truly empty.
Their between has expanded,
filling the margins,
the aisles,
till it seeps in my ears and eyes and all I have is one long

space, breathless,
dead.

It is only by surrounding,
caging,
framing,
squeezing,
shrinking,
even breaking the empty white
that it is palpable, palatable.

The frame bestows the meaning;
do not get lost in the picture
as you read between the lines.