FOR POUND BY JEAN JONES

“il miglior fabbro”

For Ron and Joe

By sheer force of personality
you demanded court and asked others
to listen to your proclamations
whether it came from the newspaper
or from whatever else you were reading.
Everything was a lecture to you,
You were Pound the teacher at
“Ezuversity” and you held court there.
James McLaughlin was spellbound by what you
proclaimed: Jefferson economics,
or Mussolini, the benevolent
dictator, who was going to lead
Italy out of this usury
mess, this problem with the Jewish
bankers who ran the whole show- You were
tired of it- That was why you were
in Italy in the first place.
But then World War II happened:
There were your broadcasts, and then there were the
camps; something you never would have guessed-
Facism died along with Benito
and you were imprisoned in a cage
and you were contemplating your fate-
You expected to be hanged-
And then there were your Pisan Cantos:
“the ant’s a centaur in his dragon world,”
“what thou lovest well, shall not be reft
from thee, what thou lovest well. . .”
And what did you discover about
yourself as you contemplated death?
What you love, lasts. As the Apostle
Paul once wrote, “Love never dies.”
You were prepared for your fate.
And what was this fate? What was coming to
you? Something you never could have seen.
A mental ward. St Elizabeth’s.
As friends visited you, they could hear the
screams near your cell everyday. It was
torture, but like all things you bore it well.
And you cast it as judgement against you.
Instead of execution, you saw now
that all they saw was an idiot.
You were really a political
prisoner. Now, Amnesty would have
listed you as a prisoner of
conscience. But you believed their lies.
You became silent. You said nothing.
In the end, they broke you, which is what
they wanted from the beginning.
You are an Orwellian hero to
me, part of a new generation
that picked up your banner and cried out,
“Study. Learn. Before you write, know what you
are doing. And remember those before
you. They wrote for a purpose. Recall it!”