My poems “Ice-Dwellers Watching the Invaders” and “Liberty Leading the People” appear in the new issue of Academic Questions, a print and online publication from the National Association of Scholars. Both poems were inspired by paintings (the second by La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix), on the topics of arctic exploration and human incursions into formerly “wild” regions in the first case and, of course, the July Revolution of 1830 in the second (although it is more a cynical swipe at the destinies of revolutions). Both poems currently reside in a manuscript for a book to be titled Welcome to All the Pleasures.

 “Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders”

Oil painting, William Bradford, c. 1870

The ship is locked beneath frozen mountains.
       It crunches by inches against white floes.
Its masts are bare cold poles of long-stripped tents,
       Its silhouette a stalagmite, its rows

Of furled sails, half-mast, sagging like bellies
       Over the black pedestal of the hull.
Five seals splash and plunge near the icy shore.
       Tubes of blood and blubber, they oar

The arctic waters, float in the ship’s reflection
       As it leans and groans on the frozen
Depths. In its dark hold are harpoons, clubs, a gun.
       Snow that took the color of the late sun

Just as easily accepts its absence.
       Nothing seems to happen. A polar bear
Is unconcerned with the peculiar presence.
       No thing would dare challenge

       The terrible essence of his deadly kingdom.
       What could kill more easily? And what for?