Holes, Scorched and Otherwise Deep

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Hope and promise fill

Eyes; white castle on the hill

Of youngest leaves green.

~ Buson [Englished by Phillip Whidden]

The harshest castles he has known are not

That pretty, noble, anything like that.

The one in Florida French cannons shot

Is hulky.  Cannonballs did not go splat

Against its thick coquina walls.  Instead

The heavy spheres went sinking deeply in

The soft, soft “rock.”  Havana’s castle dread

Delivered to him was like deadly sin

Revealed, that graphic evil of a guy

Strapped in a chair, garotte around his neck

So tight the balls popped out from pressured eye

Lids, plopping downward, gruesome this squeezed wreck.

  Another room showed men who had been torched

    (Acetalyne), their genitals gouge-scorched.

I suppose I should have told AI to look up what coquina is and should have mentioned to AI what the cannonballs did when they hit the coquina.  I was 11 when I experienced the horrors in Havana’s harbor.

© Phillip Whidden