JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Where shall I sit, he asks

and she directs him to his place. Here

at the head of the table where you always sit.

 

Children no longer, they take their seats;

a fifty year old stockbroker from Manhattan

lost in decades of cynicism

the playwright, the businessman

and she who disappeared to Korea, returning

with a moonfaced husband and six

books of Gasa verse.

 

He looks at them as if at strangers. Who are

these people at his table?  And then at the bottles

of wine, decorated cloth, bowls of parsley,

salt water, hard boiled eggs.

 

Head and hands no longer vague he lifts

his illustrated book, stained with years

and in a reedy yet firm tenor reads aloud

 

“In each generation and generation a man must

see himself as if he personally went out of Egypt”.