[New-Poetry] a happy poem

[Anny Ballardini]

Zimmer Imagines Heaven

 

For Merrill Leffler

 

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet's garden.

We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,

A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy's moustache,

John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,

Wanda Landowska lightly fingers a harpsichord,

Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and

Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.

Mozart chats with Ellington in the roses.

 

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,

Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.

The band is warming up in the Big Studio:

Bean, Brute, Bird, and Serge on saxes,

Kai Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown trombones,

Little Jazz, Clifford, Fats, Diz on trumpets,

Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano. 

Later Madam Schuman-Heink will sing Schubert.

The monks of Benedictine Abbey will chant.

There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,

James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.

Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

 

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters

Of sweetbreads, Salad Livonière,

And a tureen of Gazpacho of Màlaga.

After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.

God comes then, radiant with a bottle of cognac,

She pour generously into the snifters,

I tell Her I have begun to learn what

Heaven is about. She wants to hear.

It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.

Her smile is the best part of the day.

 

 

Paul Zimmer

[1996]




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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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