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.
UPWARD MOBILE
by Ray Greenblatt
You pursue spectator sports
as vigorously.
A professional basketball court
is a butcher’s block
upon which you slice
the most tender sirloin
hockey rink
where the Zamboni shaves ice
just like you like in martinis
that baseball sailing over the fence
a clear answer
that football
a more oblique one.
Your morning train
is a direct injection
into the heart of the city.
You have so many products
you can sell and buy
more numerous than all the saurians
in the Mesozoic Age
the number of species and tongues
lost in the 20th century.
Newton’s notations on the stock exchange
could end up tickertape on the floor
make sure your bright white shirt
does not become a bloody apron.
At home on rare occasions
when you sit in shadow of the trees
and sky turns electric just before dark
do you hear ghostly goose honks go over
intangible in the fog
do you remember
your children are friendly captives
your wife willingly signed the contract
do you feel a spectral nurse accompanies you
everywhere you go?
And from that great mass of earned knowledge
do words ever flake
agape is nested deep in your heart
caritas tingles on your fingertips.
Americans love to follow sports as a hobby and love to work hard for a living. However, sports can preoccupy our time, and the competition for success in a job can be cutthroat. Have we chosen the work that best fulfills us? And so much needs to be done in the world. With all that physical and mental activity, it is more difficult to relax, let alone be intimate with family or successfully meditate, which is good for the soul.
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.