Ogden Nash, 1902 - 1971

Goody For Our Side
And For Your Side, Too

Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you’re at
Is your habitat,
You’re a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true,
And tit leads into tat,
So the man who’s at home
When he stays in Rome
Is abroad when he’s where you’re at.

When we leave the limits of the land in which
Our birth certificates sat us,
It does not mean
Just a change of scene,
But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard,
The Scot with his kilt and sporran,
One moment he
May a native be,
And the next may find him foreign.

There’s many a difference quickly found
Between the different races,
But the only essential
Differential
Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man,
From Austrians to Australians,
That wherever he is,
He regards as his,
And the natives there, as aliens.

Oh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends,
The foreigner tells the native,
And we’ll work together for our common ends
Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine,
Why not, you ignorant foreigner?
And the native replies
Contrariwise;
And hence, my dears, the coroner.

So mind your manners when a native, please,
And doubly when you visit
And between us all
A rapport may fall
Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought, if you have it pat,
Will eliminate the coroner:
You may be a native in your habitat,
But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.

Interior Landscape

One of my favorite books is Man's Search for Meaning, penned by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl. His thesis, formed from observations acculmulated during his time in Nazi death camps, was that man has little if any control over circumstances. But—and this is a big but—you do have control over your attitude toward what is happening to you. This observation about one’s attitude became Frankl’s means of survival. Attitude and mindset are a part of one’s interior landscape, safe from intrusion.

"The Garden" by Lee Robinson from Hearsay

Now that the teenagers
have taken the house -
long legs, loud shoes, sarcastic
tongues, their paraphernalia
winding from chair
to floor to stair
like some perverse
unstoppable vine - I retire
to the garden.

Nothing here
talks back. I learn
a language the children
don't speak: lantana,
hosta, portulaca. I have gloves
but seldom use them.
I like the dirt
under my fingernails,
the roughness that comes
from pulling weeds,
churning the soil for new beds.

It's time
to pitch the rusty swing set,
to rid the shed of punctured
volleyballs, old bicycles,
a decade of water guns,
time to fill it with peat moss
and new tools:

spade, trowel, rake,
all shiny, all mine.

_______

The Rules of Evidence

What you want to say most
is inadmissible.
Say it anyway.
Say it again.
What they tell you is irrelevant
can’t be denied and will
eventually be heard.
Every question
is a leading question.
Ask it anyway, then expect
what you won’t get.
There is no such thing
as the original
so you’ll have to make do
with a reasonable facsimile.
The history of the world
is hearsay. Hear it.
The whole truth
is unspeakable
and nothing but the truth
is a lie.
I swear this.
My oath is a kiss.
I swear
by everything
incredible.

__________

Deliverance

There’s no such thing
as the necessary poem;
that’s what saves poetry
from a life like ours,
from desire and striving.
That is not to say a poem
can’t yearn for something
it isn’t yet, can’t crave
a meal of only apricots
or want a one-way ticket
to another country.
It can. We know
how a poem can need so much
it turns to mush, and how
sometimes even out of mud
and mildew rise the most
fantastic flowers. No,
what I mean is different.
That the poem is redeemed
by indifference, that before
it’s written, the world
does very well without it.
Therefore it is free
to be what it wants to be
or not to be at all.
That’s its deliverance,
its saving grace, and why
when it decides to speak
we listen to a language
that is ours, but so unlike us.

Suzy Gershman