"Question" (1922), by Langston Hughes

"Grant Park," by Langston Hughes

"Retrospection," by Charlotte Brontë

"Interim," by Lola Ridge

"The Fiddler," by Lola Ridge

"Apocryphal Couples"

Attila and Heidi Hun are making an RV run
from East to West.
Captain and Margo Ahab peddle pleasure-crafts
on the Gulf Coast.
Gregor and Donnie Mendel enjoy amateur
entomology in their spare time.
Sisyphus performs the boulder-roll
at Cirque de Absurd in Vegas,
where his girlfriend, Missyphus,
deals blackjack.
Matsuo and Yoshi Basho run
a very successful outdoor-adventure
business in Colorado and Chile.
Pancho and Vivienne Villa
just signed with a cable network
to do their own Reality Revolutionary
show. Exciting!Huck Finn
sells insurance for a firm
owned by Jim X in Chicago,
which he finds to be a might cold.
He and Becky Thatcher
have been seeing each other.


hans ostrom 2014

"Sonnet on Approaching Italy," by Hans Ostrom

"No Greatest Country"

Nobody lives in "the greatest country in the world,"
which is a phrase, not a nation.
Nobody and Plato's hologram.

Wouldn't a good nation cherish its skeptics,
partly because politicians and other
propagandists don't?

No one's more patriotic than a dictator:
fallacious reasoning, sure, but
nonetheless worthy of a cautionary pause.

Often I listen to a voice in me
that recoils from appeals to patriotism
because they feel like extortion.


hans ostrom 2014

"Eternity," by William Blake

"November Night," by Adelaide Crapsey

"The Dead," by Rupert Brooke

"Soldier's Dream," by Wilfred Owen

"Wisdom," by Siegfried Sassoon