POETRY

The Prayer for a Rainbow

by Frederick Dolgin

A picket sign, a green card: only documents for dissidents:
Pick-pocketed pensioners with pens and pillars of eventual thoughts
That became computer programmers, or alibis for welfare fraud,
And/or entrepreneurs. Brodsky had a discrepancy with history,
Or was it Tolstoy? Regardless, because critiques of War and Peace
Are much too dangerous for humans to embark upon. It would,
Perhaps, be simpler to conclude that the flood began when Pushkin died,
And the ark surfaced somewhere in Bensonhurst in 1979.
Ironically, some of Us slept a few nights in Rome: From this perspective
Venice is within reach, like Stockholm from St. Petersburg, Yosef wrote.
But for those of us in Brooklyn, for whom a rainbow could potentially
Predict a practice in medicine -- perhaps -- in law, or a professorship,
Was merely God’s reoccurring message to the world that although
Destruction was probably what humanity deserved, a word is an
Eternal promise -- sadly one that We have not lived up to.

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