Gib Hall Revisited

[FOR WAYNE BROWN]

In those raft-planked bunkhouses christened Gibraltar

by World War II DPs, as if they knew

we’d drift like displaced persons too, but even further

from Europe than the homesick, homeless Jew

to that new world already tagged and named

what could we add but rhetoric, who had

less faith than the prophetically maimed?

A generation late, I sadden

that the brightest ones were sold

to a system, like those stars to Arabic,

that our first Christmas riots hid the sick

envy of Caliban for our master’s gown

of ersatz ermine; fearing the fission

of red gown to black, of fire to ash, we moved

across dry campus grass in separate flames,

cold, unlit candles looking for one vision,

our red gowns wilted like poinsettia.

Now, in the black, processioned and approved,

old hands acknowledge us by our first names,

the red gowns mark the same betrayals down.