George Drew
Crocket in Babylon
The Hanging Gardens are gone,
and for the horse and buggy
corps
business is bad: one fare per
day
instead of the normal ten or
more.
And sure enough, prophets
outside the great gate
prophesy
the fall of the sacred tower
and in its smoke and rubble
legions of feet with toes
fused
and blackened arms and legs
over which wild dogs and rats
fight
until people and pigeons
flee,
even the crazy scat of taxi
horns
diminishing to discrete
beeps.
Expect the worst, he was
told,
and for thirty blocks walks
south
down one avenue after another
humming blues so blue
even Robert Johnson’s funky
tunes
are veritable odes to joy.
And when a man storming out
of a bagel shop on Broadway
bumps
into him, "Death to
Nebuchadnezzar,"
the man shouts in a strange
tongue.
And ashes settle over
everything.
And lions and dragons slink
away.
George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New
York, where he currently resides. His work has appeared in journals such
as Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron
Review, Hollins Critic, Maine Times, Mississippi
Review, The Quarterly, Quarterly West, Salmagundi,
Southern Poetry Review, Vermont Literary Review, and many
others. Toads in a Poisoned Tank, his first book, was published
in 1986, and a chapbook, So Many Bones (Poems of Russia), in 1997
by a Russian press, in a bilingual edition. He is the recipient of the
2003 Paumanok Poetry Award. | 