B.Z. Niditch- Two Poems

 RETURNING FROM WAR

Rubble on country roads
with an indifferent air,
and sleepless disappearance
you wander for miles
where birds are holed
in green branches
your thirst even now
in hunger's memory
and hunted images
from your tired eyes,
in the abyss,for loss
there is no easy departure.


REAL TIME

In major acts of witnessing
these cynical times
as a minor clerk reporter
from the bench
at a system which passes
out sentences
by corrupt judges
acting like Platonic cave
dwellers or soap opera's
drama kings and queens
having transgressed
any real time truth
for us without ways
or means, irony,only rumor
or any sense of humor
by exploiting motives
of personal innuendo
over beaten up pages
recording at a hearing
a thousand lines long
these long robed guys
having explored
words through cases
of evidence jotted down
with dull domestic faces
looking like tombstone clowns
in a Dickensian world
to judge and jury
saying in a straight face
who is guilty or not.