Caspar David Friedrich, “Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon” (circa 1824)
Heart Attack: An Old
Man’s Tears at Midnight
Ode To Robert Frost
and Roads Not Taken
I knocked you down repeatedly,
I spit in your saintly face.
At times I exposed you
to the scorn of public disgrace.
Now you come to haunt me
In the darkness of this night.
Rattling these stillborn chains I wear
God dam it, you’ve come to fight.
I told you I don’t want you.
Your pregnant with darkened suns.
Yet in winter’s still cold nights
I’m sure that you will come.
You’ll fight me to the death.
It’s that you’ll likely do,
As I struggle inside my brain
To rid myself of you.
Now my eyes begin to water
As I curl up in my bed,
The darkness circles through my veins
The pillow moistens by my head.
You know I have a weak heart
So be gone you motley fool.
Good lord I mustn’t wrestle
With the misery of my soul.
Eater’s Eulogy
On the Whole Science
of Invented Foods
Nature’s world lacking prisms
weeders labors go lost.
But with new gardeners
that distinguish between pleasure, pain, and frost,
we can label yellow and chartreuse
separate turquoise and maroon,
trick the soil and rainfall
baffle the sun and the moon.
But plum blossoms become lemon thorns
as all red apples grow sour,
and at harvest time, they’re no buyers,
you see, no one eats anymore.
About the author
Edward Ziegler is an author, poet, lecturer, and legal scholar who lives and writes in the Wildcat Mountains just south of Denver in the USA. He is a native Kentuckian, a former All-American high school and Notre Dame footballer, an alumnus of the New York Giants, and an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Denver, where he was holder of the Robert B. Yegge Memorial Research Chair in Law as well as co-founder and past President of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. He is also a European Union Distinguished Erasmus Mundus International Legal Scholar. He has the rare distinction of having his legal writing cited and quoted by both the U.S. Supreme Court as well as by courts in all fifty states in the USA. He is considered one of the more prolific and influential legal scholars of his generation. His recent memoirs and poetry are now found in numerous literary journals throughout the world, including Taj Mahal Review and Last Leaves. Online edwardziegler.com.
