Poetry by Robert David Cohen: My gone mother on Mars

My gone mother on Mars
Searching for signs of life
Searching for her lungs

She has 1950s curlers in her hair
Smoking 2-3 cigarettes

Mom is right and she is wrong
Lonely in her skin

She dances on her peg leg
Spins on the never-healing stump

Her arm rises in the air
It's just my funny brain tumor
She says

In a crater she finds remnants of Yiddish
Fragments of a Russian lullaby

Her hands are bigger than mine
Knuckles knobbier

She visits me in Mexico, in Cuba

To keep me from floating away
She holds my foot

Martian booby traps everywhere

She has only six months to live
forever

How will she survive her life
On the Red White and Blue Planet?

-- New York, March 28, 2011

ABOUT ME

Poetry was a huge part of my life in the 60s. I wrote like a madman, published a bit, gave readings and was generally active in the New York poetry scene. Then I moved to Mexico -- where I co-edited El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn with Margaret Randall in 1968-69 -- and then to Cuba (1969-76), a period in which journalism and politics took center stage.

I returned to the US in 1976 and worked as a journalist at the UN and in Washington until 1990, when I joined UNICEF as speech writer (NY) and then communication officer (Mexico DF, Geneva and Panama City). Retired from UNICEF in 2008 and set up a New York and Pretoria-based communication consulting company with another former UN information officer, Paul Hoeffel.

I continued writing poetry over the years, published a chapbook but not much else. This blog gathers some of the poems written across the decades. I've indicated where some of them were published; most are seeing the light of day only here. I'll be adding poems -- old and new -- little by little.

Given how easy it is to edit texts on a blog, I probably won't be able to resist the impulse to tweak, so some of the poems just might continue to evolve before your very eyes.

Enjoy, comment, criticize!

PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS

· Rebelion en Estados Unidos, Antologia Documental (Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico DF 1969)

· The New Yorker Book of Poems (Morrow Paperback Editions, New York, 1974)

· There is a Country, Poems 1969-1977 (West End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1979)

Poems published in The New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Paris Review, Promethean, Angel Hair, Casa de las Americas, El Corno Emplumado, etc.

Awards: Discovery 65 (The Poetry Center); Book of the Month Club Young Writers' Fellowship (1967)

My gone mother on Mars

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