Luna My Captive
And seriously now the guitar is beating me up It is shoving me into the narrow range of its cheerful melancholy And all sorts of feelings I want to have I cannot My feet start to move in exactly the same way They did for so many years each time I entered The tin shack where the dancing occurred Again I see you Luna just as I did When I was a boy once and everything Made a large kind of sense we were being guarded The new wave band with the exciting hair Produced inside us the same faint scent Of oranges that filled the patio in ancient holy Spain We read about in our textbooks We knew someday we would go Together there and feel our song In the narrow alleyways made sense We would sing it and drink each other’s blood Which would only make us grow stronger Sometimes we talked about just going to Panama To watch the ships move through the artificial scar Overlords made in earth to bring the goods we loved We put them in our mouths and on our record players Luna I am losing the red thread I want to rush back out into the street Away from this terrible guitar that is making me feel I’m just a chandelier in the reflections of my own Glass droplets quantifying what has passed Too enervated to keep toiling like a star Luna I don’t mean to say it’s all been a loss There was that class I took on how to ride The carousel holding my nephew But it’s impossible to be positive with this guitar playing There is something inside the tune I can’t alter and this man is singing All these songs about going there To be honest I just gave up and moved I hear my sister yelling in the yard Luna I’m going to bring my head outside To see if I can scare some crows They have bad manners not that I really care There are three of them right now Making me think of you and me and the other one The best evening of my life was when we parked Above that hill and talked all night About the things we would never do Until we grew dark and indifferent As a well in a ruined village The army passes by…
Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Zapruder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 26, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Most of the time, the voice in my poems is that of a person more or less like me, sharing my concerns, living in a reality more or less like mine. Lately, however, in poems such as ‘Luna My Captive,’ other voices have also, to my great surprise, begun to appear. The reality these voices inhabit seems to be a more extreme version of ours: a society that has gone through a violent trauma, a civil war or some other conflict, from which it has only recently emerged into a new, equally traumatic modernity. Shelley writes that poets are mirrors, reflecting ‘giant shadows which futurity casts upon the present.’ I find it exciting and worrisome to think these poems might be that sort of mirror of our own future.”
—Matthew Zapruder