Pratik : PRATIK LA SPECIAL iSSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET JAMES RAGAN'S "Mugwampery"

Monday, September 20, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL iSSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET JAMES RAGAN'S "Mugwampery"

JAMES RAGAN

Mugwampery

to endeavor to put a respectable face on it.

I’ve watched the aging age, resigned

to the course of growing any crease in skin,

its browning galaxy of spokes

flamed out like a smoldering map

on the charred tree of the hand.

I’ve watched them limp into their borrowed knees,

cough their sneeze with choired spools of breath

as if rehearsing notes of spring or dispelling

a heard word that’s off-put and off-color.

I’ve seen them fall into a chair

like shafts of walking lumber.

I’ve watched them breed at chessboards

like birchbarks wintering away until they bald

to gray and patches of white. I’ve seen each

lope to the table on the half-arm like a flat-

tired jalopy that has gasped away its engine.

I’ve watched them offer all their will

to sight, voice, and half their weight

in trade to the charity of memory,

if once more they could stroke a son’s ballgame hair

or cup a daughter’s wedding cheek.

I’ve seen hope’s dream awaken

what, on the face of it, might seem

the heart’s need to make amends,

to live out the rest of my mind’s days

until I grow old enough to be young again.

James Ragan has published 10 books of poetry and is translated into 15 languages with poems in Poetry, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today and 30 anthologies. Plays produced in the U.S. Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague. Honors include 2 Honorary Ph.D’s, 3 Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart nominations, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, and the Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival as subject of the documentary, “Flowers and Roots, Ambassador of the Arts.”

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