Poetry by Robert David Cohen: October 2012

Came the circus to town

I stood in line

Bought my ticket

Expectations low

And was surprised

For a change the clowns weren’t sad

Clearly they’d made love all afternoon

The acrobats had wings

But were human after all

One of them cried after falling into the net

I could tell that one of the horses was galloping

In a parallel universe

Defying the whip

The mama elephant with huge scars on her side

Cut short her routine

To nuzzle her calf

A terrified girl in the crowd

Was being comforted by a frightened boy

“The sawdust on the cuffs of my pants

Is so beautiful,”

I thought

“I’ll put my head into the lion’s mouth”

And I did

I did

I did!

That day I was

-- to paraphrase MacLeish --

Seven of the nineteen good people in the world

-- New York, October 9, 2012

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)

Poetry by Robert David Cohen

Day at the circus

Before the heat gets unbearable