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The Celts
(a Reconstruction) -for Seamus Heaney
...The enemy...even when their hope of safety was at an end,
displayed a prodigious courage. When their front rank had fallen,
the next stood on the prostrate forms and fought from them; when
these were cast down, and the corpses were piled up in heaps, the
survivors, standing as it were upon a mound, hurled darts at our
troops, or caught and returned javelins....This engagement
brought the name and nation of the Nervii almost to utter
destruction....From six hundred tribal councillors they had been
reduced to three, and from sixty thousand to barely five hundred
that could bear arms.
--Caesar on the Battle of the Sambre, Gallic War,
You will not pass here.
We will take all your legions down,
body upon body,
until either you or we
are none.
We will not leave our young
to your rapine.
We are simple, lethal,
and finite;
We are the shamen
Of Death.
We know that we will die
Exiled from the land and the heart.
But our word goes on
unto the light of the stars,
Until, in the long sweep
of the long arm of conquest,
you are read for what you are
and for what you are not.
We promise you this:
we give not what you demand;
we keep what our Word requests:
You cannot pass here;
Our songs our mystery
will take all your legions down.
A Camera as Big as The Ritz
-Frontispiece/ American Album
The window lets in light
to keep it from getting out again.
In the greenhouse,
the roses of Central Parkway,
the sunflowers of Kansas,
the eucalyptus
of San Francisco
all bloom still.
The long trains
going from New York
to the City of Angels
stop and go
in no time:
the right of passage is no more.
Men focus on what is not in store.
And in this music, the band within
dreams scheherezade, World's Fair, Luna Park,
and playing them.
The glass
on the end of the bellows
opens up on you:
Come in.
the greenhouse
in the dark
is home.
Robert Blake Truscott has had work appear in over 40 journals in 20 states and in several anthologies,
including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Nimrod, The Mississippi Review, Sou’wester, The Greenfield Review, The
California Quarterly, and The Literary Review. More recently, his work appeared in the anthology In The West of
Ireland, and The Hampden-Sydney Review Anthology, among others. Mr. Truscott is published in a number of educational
texts published by the Research Education Association, and he was the poetry editor for more than a decade with Stone
Country before that journal ceased publication. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and currently
teaches writing as a distance learning instructor and also contributes as an instructional designer for Colorado
Technical University and Regis University. Mr. Truscott was the Assistant Director and Writing Specialist for
The Douglass/Cook College writing Center at Rutgers University for seven years, and was a Senior Communications
Consultant for SWG Consulting in New York City for 15 years. He is currently married and lives in Colorado in the shadow of Pikes Peak.
Email: Robert Blake Truscott
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