Today's poem is by George Szirtes

Maternal
       

The city is your mother: extensive,
consoling, and utterly strange. There are
parts you wouldn't want to visit and parts
you have escaped from. There are the noises
she makes at night when dreaming. They
are your dreams too. Those noises were
your first words before you named
the world according to your needs,
which were also her needs. Who can tell
city from flesh? Car horn from lullaby?
Who can you turn to for condolence,
for admonishment in a known language,
for the ground of your liquidity?
Who launders your trade figures?
Who survives her periodical crashes?
Who is your cultural capital?
Who will you touch for love?

            Death is a shower of green figures
            on a computer screen. You watch
            The Matrix for the fifth or sixth time
            mainly for the ballet of violence
            for shades and clothes and slick hair
            for the choosing of red or blue pills
            for human-machine dialogue
            for the notion of the androgynous saviour
            for the mystical Other you yourself might become
            for the hovering in the air,
            for the constant resurrection of death
            for the deluge of green figures.

                        We have unlocked doors and are out in the streets
                        moving like figures in a pretend city
                        oblivious to what passes among us
                        and is constantly reassembling itself.
                        We live with the knowledge of atrocity
                        and disaster. We walk through fire and flood,
                        through the sick bays of distant hospitals
                        down miserable alleys and financial darkness.
                        But this is normal. We watch endless repeats
                        of the same misadventures. We continue shopping
                        and sleeping and swallowing. We keep swallowing.
                        The colour of the pill doesn't matter.
                        We are where we happen to be. Outside in the street.

            I keep forgetting the maternal city
            in which I was born and still exist,
            ascending and descending its stairwells
            and affections. I am in its streets
            at night, on the Danube embankment,
            haunting myself. I am the doppelganger
            that accompanies me on my night excursions.
            This is the land of the phantom, he tells me,
            but it is beautiful and maternal and free.
            The planet may explode but this is order
            the way you first heard it. Can you hear it?
            It will gather your loves in its arms
            and shelter them. You need understand nothing.
            This is the blue pill. Take it. Live with it.

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Copyright © 2023 George Szirtes All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission