Richard Weaver

By Richard Weaver
San Diego, California, USA

As the Prince of Thebes, I always dress in silks 
and bright bangles. You say I am my art
living through the rapt eyes of others. 
They see Berlin or Munich in my mirror, 
but look away, embarrassed, confused 
when I enter a room because I am a Jew. 
Their laughter chases me down the street. 
Ridicule, my ungrateful friend, my servant,
my only living child, dances alongside me. 
And now you are dead. First Georg.
Now you, Franz. Why you? Why does God . . .
This war promised to free us but stains the sky daily 
with migraines. I curse it and those who wear it
on their bloated bellies, and make their hearts 
and our hope demented pincushions. You, the penultimate 
blue child, have bowed beneath bullets, suffered death 
so that we may . . . what? Live without? Die with? 
I and I not I and thou have packed what little there is,
what little is left of me that can be carried away,
and arrangements made through Switzerland 
to reach Palestine. God knows I will be unhappy there 
as a blind woman with mismatched glass eyes.
Don’t worry about me: I know this war to end all wars 
is  only the next before the next promised last.
I say goodbye now to the fixed stars and hello
to my new home, the friendless streets armed 
with dark teeth and slurs, sleepless rain and constant 
sorrow, the stone heart I carry long past its due date. 
But unlike you I am not dead. More pain must pass 
before I embrace the bitter earth. 
My heartland is not yet a river damned.

From a collection of poems written as an ekphrastic response to the German Expressionist painter, Franz Marc. Marc was stationed near Verdun, France, where nearly 1 million soldiers died. He and Wassily Kandinsky co-founded the Blue Rider movement. Marc died on March 4, 1916.