POETRY MONDAY: APRIL 6, 2009
Freddy Frankel
Until now, all the poets we’ve featured have been those whose work we already knew and admired. Today I have the pleasure of introducing someone whose poems arrived as a delightful surprise. I was impressed, not only with the quality of his work but with the story of how he came, late in life, to devote himself to poetry.
Freddy Frankel was born in 1925. Educated in the Transvaal (now Gauteng), South Africa, he migrated to the U.S. in 1962. Since his retirement from his position as Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital in 1997, he has devoted his time to honing his skills as a poet, and his achievements are considerable.
In 2003 he won the New England Writers Robert Penn Warren First Award and his chapbook, Hottentot Venus: Poems of Apartheid, was published by Pudding House. His second, In a Stone’s Hollow, was published by the Fairweather Imprint of Bedbug Press in 2006. It includes, among others, poems on apartheid and poems on World War II, in which he served as a corporal in the South African Medical Corps.. His work has also appeared in many journals, including Cape Codder, Cape Cod’s Literary VOICE, Ibbetson Street, Moment, Passager, The Concho River Review, The Iconoclast, The Larcom Review, and in three anthologies.
Freddy Frankel lives with his wife Betty in Newton, Massachusetts.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Joshua at Jericho
Above the trumpeted walls a frozen
sun bewildered in the sky. A waste
of bodies crimson inside-out
covers the innocent battle-field!
Where is the God of Creation in this
genocide, does He wring His hands
when children in His image fall?
In the beginning
His fetish was fertility,
Multiply, fill the land like sand the shore.
He meddled in conception – smoothed
the bed-clothes, laid down
velvet in the wombs, circumcision
imprints round as wedding bands.
Joseph
While still a boy I cut through
dreams, turned their contents
inside out, sifted echoes, threats
and hidden longings,
even sacred messages:
a desert storm meant
drought – a hooded crow,
death.
Good fortune distilled the clouds,
dissolved the clots
in memory – I kissed my callous
brothers and washed their feet.
Did this inspire heaven to curb
its zeal? It is said
I stamped Mercy on the coins –
God had not the heart to stop me.
Sarah
Her Isaac tall and pensive as the landscape
stooped with deadwood on its back.
Her husband leans as if he clasps
an urgent message in his fist –
could it be the one to harm
his son, placate
the mad voice in his head?
They clamber up the rise.
All day her anchor drags –
yesterday he bought a bracelet
from a peddler, bronze embossed
with silver roses on the rim!
When they left he snatched away from her
his hand
like the lash of a whip –
tore her skin, his guilt
still chafes her palm