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.
VENICE SUBMERGED
by Ray Greenblatt
Only the tourists care now
donning scuba gear to sink into
to sink back into this womb of a world
into waters where pollution has been swept away
by this whirling locus of West meeting East;
though the manifold portraits in palazzos are gone
their spirits have been set free
by the purifying waters;
past the arcades and screens of the Doge’s palace
gilt altarpieces now shipwrecks gathering barnacles
over and under bridges they flutter
coral resembling lemon and olive trees
canals so many racing lanes;
they swim like the naked cherubs in the still spouting fountains
float over the gleaming dome of Saint Marks
and a winged lion perched on a pole
the pigeons transformed into sole.
The scuba men pass Harry’s Bar
where Hemingway in perennial safari outfit
swaps conceits with scarlet-lipped Baron Corvo;
they can still hear arias of gondoliers
and Browning at his toccata;
past Byron swimming tipsily home
and Diaghilev jetting by
past Thomas Mann who still imagines
he is judging the boy with tightest well-turned rump
and penis non-threateningly petit
past priests their black cassocks spread like manta rays;
some divers search for a legendary air pocket
in which a coifed harlot might lie;
humans can not breathe in water, we are told,
but if they could sidestroke this one minor rule
they could inhale, indeed could ingest the living past.
Venice is an ancient, beautiful, mysterious city. It has always had flooding problems. What if it was completely inundated, like Atlantis! Since this is a poem, I also wanted to include other authors who have had connections with this magical city.
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.