Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Crisis and Confidence  
Brian Russell

The city which had taken
The whole world was itself
Taken that’s what Saint
Jerome said of Rome in a letter
To a friend in the fifth century
The year of our lord the beautiful

Naked foreign bodies of
Barbarians poured through the
Salarian gate opened fast
And wide by slaves and bodies
Rushed to fill each space

Swift and fluid as the sea
Into a ship’s hold the stable
World free floating the disaster
Exactly preserved the greatest
Achievements of man crawled
With men no more than animals

No less the noose
Wound round the throat

Of scholarship and law and philosophy and
Politics and poverty and sickness and slavery
And corruption and decadence this quickly
History makes ruins of what we thought

We built so solidly the bronze
Forms cast shadows across the lawn
Of the forum against the light
Of the fires in the city
Of god my god who didn’t believe
It was too big to fall.

 

Brian Russell holds a MFA from the University of Houston where he served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. His manuscript, Nights Under Water, was a finalist for this year’s Miller Williams Prize (University of Arkansas Press) and Cleveland State Poetry Center First Book Prize. His poems have appeared in Epoch, Mid-American Review, LIT, Quarterly West, and Hanging Loose.