Donald Lev
Good Friday
Jesus fell
off the cross just as the bell
announced the store was closing.
Everyone made a bee line for the checkout counters
and forgot all about Jesus
who picked himself up and dragged himself to the bus stop
and somehow made it back home without anyone being the wiser.
This denouement, which I know of, and now you do too, obviously
has made little difference to history, but seems to be mysteriously
reflected in a public radio program I heard this afternoon comparing
lamb recipes for Easter with a recipe for special chicken soup for
Passover using only wings.
Birdsnest
A birdsnest--a rather large one--
as precise an observation as I am capable of--
has been lying on the ground in front of my house
all winter, and has become visible as the snow has been melting.
Perhaps I should, haiku like, leave it at that.
A flawed symbol of spring.
The Workshop
Maybe you just didn't do it right.
Did you hold it straight out in front of your chest?
Were your elbows unbent?
Were your eyes open or closed?
There is a difference between great art and yours.
We've got to find out what it is.
About the Author
Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a 6-year hiatus
in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. Among his honors have been a
Madeline Sadin Award from New York Quarterly in 1973 and a Life Time Achievement Award from the Catskill Reading Society/Outloudbooks in 2003. In 2008 Outloudbooks brought out his The Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002 a sampling from the first four decades of his writing.
A chapbook, Only Wings: 20 Poems of Devotion will be published this year (2010) by Presa Press in Michigan. His brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of "The Poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 classic Putney Swope.
He and his reclusive cat Kit Smart live in High Falls, NY, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid Home Planet News,
which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.