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Poems

"April Fools’ Day" [by Elaine Feinstein, 1930-2019]

April Fools’ Day
in memory of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?
Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,
to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,
writing his poetry by candle ends.
His fellow soldiers always found him odd.
Outsiders do not easily make friends
if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

He should have stayed in Cape Town with his sister.
Did he miss Marsh’s breakfasts at Gray’s Inn,
or Café Royal? He longed for the centre
though he was always shy with Oxbridge toffs –
He lacked the sexy eyes of Mark Gertler –
and his Litvak underlip could put them off.
From Stepney East!’ as Pound wrote
Harriet Monroe, while sending poems to her.

-- Elaine Feinstein

The poet Elaine Feinstein's Collected Poems and Translations was published by Carcanet Press in 2002. Educated at Cambridge (Newnham), she wrote poetry, novels, and biographies of  the Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. The Border (1985) is a novel based in Sydney about a woman who had escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939.


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Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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