Spinoza in the Ghetto

1927 –

Sketching in the ghetto, Spinoza smokes,
drinks a Dutch beer. Happiness is a chat
with friends. Enemies? He has none. He jokes
about the seen. His invisible is fat
with stars. Love keeps them spinning, and God who
is everywhere is also infinite
and nothing, just like death which isn’t true
to life experience and best forgot.
At forty-three the grinder’s sick. The good
is what he calmly wants, and he is good,
his friends affirm. He’s swallowed too much dust
from grinding lenses. His lungs aren’t clean,
time isn’t real, and grim with glassy lust
for God as space, he fingers the unseen.

A Sunny Room at Mount Sinai, 1955

Mount Sinai Hospital. My mother lay
in a good corner room with lots of sun.
The surgeon traced the steps of her death dance.
A soldier then, I’d flown in from France
where in Périgueux’s children’s ward, one day
I saw a young girl in a coma. Sun
came through glass walls; the child was beautiful,

Willis Barnstone

2015

Gospel of Clouds

On cloudy Sundays clouds are in my heart
as if my brother came, as if the rain
lingered among the mushrooms and the art
of freedom washed into the murder train
or rinsed the peat bog soldiers of the camp.¹
On cloudy Sundays clouds are with Joe Hill.
Last night I dreamt he was alive. The tramp

Willis Barnstone

2015

The Good

On the first morning of the moon, in land
under the birds of Ur, before the flood
dirties the memory of a couple banned
from apples and the fatal fire of blood,
Adam and Eve walk in the ghetto park,
circling a tree. They do not know the way
to make their bodies shiver in the spark

Willis Barnstone

2015

Poems

Spinoza in the Ghetto

More by this poet

A Sunny Room at Mount Sinai, 1955

Gospel of Clouds

The Good

Poems

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Spinoza in the Ghetto

More by this poet

A Sunny Room at Mount Sinai, 1955

Gospel of Clouds

The Good

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