Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025
Elegies, poems by Michael Minassian.
Elegies
I give you silence.
I give you florid sentences.
I give you elegies
written in Braille.
I give you days and nights
that repeat themselves,
as the poet said,
in tedious arguments.
I give you wonder.
I give you despair.
What shall you give me?
what shall you give
the rest of us?
The time we have left
to receive what is ours,
what is lost?
The Voices in my Head
When I woke up this morning,
I thought of my parents
and asked both of them
about my changing jobs
and moving to another state.
My father, as usual, had little to say,
but my mother, a child of the Depression
fretted about the financial risks—
I could hear her voice
even from the grave.
The last time I saw her
she wasn’t worried about money
or much of anything else,
her mind off somewhere
on a long journey alone.
As for my father, I imagine him
in his favorite recliner,
watching sports on television,
waving his hand in that way he had,
“You’ll figure it out,” he’d bark.
A banker, he had a knack for numbers,
kept complicated calculations in his head—
when the doctors told him
how much longer he had to live,
he counted all the way down
to zero and then was gone.
Barely Heard
Some poets have animals
populate their poems:
black birds, elephants, or mice.
They worry about crushing weight,
the scrabble of claws on the roof,
hear scratching behind the wall.
Their angels wear black wings,
follow each other tail by tail,
leave droppings under the sink.
Some poems poise on the pen
like a bird before it takes flight;
some lie in wait for words
to nudge themselves, stand
on two legs instead of four,
a rustle of fanning feathers,
the turn of a murder of crows,
the swish of a tail,
the sigh of breath, barely heard.
It’s A Black And White World, Again
In Casablanca, the Nazis have loud voices
and throw people out of windows,
or maybe they’re just checking for rain—
everyone runs around going to secret meetings
or gambles at Rick’s Place (and loses)
although the wheel is sometimes rigged.
Young women, married and single,
throw themselves at Rick who’s
pretending to be Humphrey Bogart.
Claude Rains, who used to be The Invisible Man,
is Louie, a cop, and Rick’s friend;
the people who work for Rick are all Antifa
disguised as waiters and Casino workers;
some of them speak in bad accents
and sing La Marseillaise while crying
and playing the guitar, except for Sam
who knows he better stay put.
In 1942, the Germans were Nazis
and they want to close Rick’s place;
Rick’s ex who dumped him in Paris
comes to his Café Américain gin joint
with her husband, a big Antifa,
who speaks with an Eastern European
accent and might be KGB or FSS.
Like many in transit in Casablanca
they covet transport papers
(as if a green card was a green light)
so they can fly to Portugal
then get to America on an airplane
even though Rick says:
They’re all asleep in New York.
Oh, and Sidney Greenstreet wants to stay
in Casablanca, since he’s a capitalist
and doesn’t mind Nazi money
although he mainly seems to have
wandered into this movie from the set
of the Maltese Falcon—so does Peter Lorre,
but at least he gets to read different lines
and learns to fly, but not the way he thought.
After all, this whole story is from the script
of an unproduced Broadway play
which somehow ended up as a movie
where people speak in code—
maybe because they forgot their lines.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
© Michael Minassian
Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com