Two Poems

Hollow Lamp

My palms are raw from rubbing.
Dented  bronze lamp empty of oil,
and in its spout a dead wick.
No jinni roars forth in rising smoke.
Yet he's there, camel master to a caravan of mirages.
I hold the lamp over my head, turn it upside down,
put my eye near the spout
and behold him in the recess of the lamp.
I prod him out of the shadows with a not so gentle shake.
The hierarchy of spirits and mortals inverts,
for the jinni cowers before my godlike gaze.
Yet he denies my petition.
I ask him why.
He said eons of confinement have made him snug
and fearful of far horizons.
I ask again why.
Old gods fall from fashion;
let new gods now hear the ten billion pleas.
I dare ask why a third time.
Then he laughs,
tells me to get more lost than I already am,
and speaks of all who beg for that fourth wish
just to undo the third.

Birthing a Brooklyn Legend

“Open the door, Richard,” was Henry's usual greeting.
Open the door, Richard is now a long forgotten popular song.
But on that long ago day Henry and his wife were almost done loading,
and the old familiar truck had its engine idling.
Gray hair, weather-beaten face, big smile, broken teeth, old Henry said,
“Bye kid, and remember the last potato farmer in Brooklyn and his good-for-nothing farm.
Rich, live up to your name.  Don't be a poor dirt scratcher like me.”
(But I soon learned that there are so many other ways to be poor.)
His wife gave me one last piece of homemade pound cake,
then one last chair was loaded and tied down, and they were gone.
Their old house became a wino's shack until it burnt down later that summer.
In the nearby pond, the frogs I use to hunt dug into the mud that fall
but never came up to greet the next spring,
for tractors scraped all topsoil and surfaces away,
and the new housing projects rose almost as swiftly as weeds.
I don't recall the exact address,
or if that place ever had an address except Henry's farm.
It was just north of Coney Island next to the rail yard
and in sight of Coney Island Creek.
In another fifty years when I will have caught up to Henry
and filled him in on what happened to his old place,
you who are now listening, if you're a young poet,
should write a poem about hearing a poem about the last potato farm in Brooklyn.
Remember Henry's name even if you forget mine.
And after five decades, if you've forgotten some details, then improvise.
I did.

Richard Fein has been published in many web and print journals, such as Southern Review, Morpo Review, Skyline, Oregon East Southern Humanities Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, KansasQuarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain and many others. I also have an interest in digital photography and have published many of my photos. Samples of my photography can be found on http://www.pbase.com/bardofbyte

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