<GROAN>
Roger
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Cooper" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 2:12 PM
Subject: Prague In Midsummer (revised)
So, here's what's turned out after a lot of work.
It's still got long lines - and it's still in 4,5,5 lined stanzas
(And, Oh, how publishers groan when they see how it's been written!)
(and any further comments also welcome!)
Prague In Midsummer
I almost cry in the thirty-degree heat below the National Museum
at the shrine of Jan Palach – his dates and small photograph
almost obscured by flowers – where tourists pause, smile at camcorders
and speak American with the bronze Wenceslas statue above them
and behind the baseball caps, the Hawaiian shirts, a steel-wire sculpture,
taller than the saint, of a young woman’s legs, her panties below her knees,
and beyond pavements, cooler under the shadows of awnings and trees,
are the crowded street-cafes where tables wobble beneath pizzas and beer,
the rock music in shops, dark casino doorways, sweating bouncers outside
bars,
but way above us, through the Museum’s open windows on the top floor,
there’ll still be hushed people who’ve seen what’s displayed, read the
signs,
who now look down on the Square – we don’t see them, they don’t see us
just the 21st Century the young student died for, such small people moving
and the long naked legs, the almost lost knickers.
Bob Cooper
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