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Michael Salcman
The Coup
Michael Salcman
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When the generals come they will be dressed in suits and ties. They will bear titles like delegate and representative of the people. They will feed the widow and bury the child. Each spring the garden will grow the same apple passing it from tree to tree. The catamount will sing with the strongest, the worker in his mirror, the police in their cars. My tulip poplars will lose their blossoms at the start of Spring.
The generals will make peace with our enemies and war with our friends. They will make gods of themselves and slaves of their subjects. They will smile in the afternoon and frown at midnight. They will pass laws for others but not for themselves. They will still look like the sort of Boy Scout who helps an old lady cross a street against her will.
They always tell us attendance is voluntary but don’t fail to come to the meetings.
Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021
Gratitude
Michael Salcman
Thank God for science, for the two eyes, Two hands and two ears That investigate the world For the brain that invents its own world For the feet that know when to turn away For the heart that knows when to pray For the nose that goes just ahead of us And the generations who went before For the gift of DNA, in all its stability And mutability For the love of charm and spore Invisible neutrino and weighty quark The animals who left the ark And that blessed wedge between light and dark.
Michael Salcman: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). He lives in Baltimore.
