Cain's Punishment

By Lewis C. Mainzer

These poems reflect on Cains punishment for killing Abel, mischief that Jane Austens Elizabeth still causes, three swimmers striving to cross Puffers Pond, Albert Einsteins barbershop visit, a murder-suicide and a botched execution, father and sons picking wild blueberries, a snowman built by neighbor children, winter cold and silent snow, nursing home, hospice, and death, feeding quarrelsome birds and judging geese and falcons, love for a wife and tears of a father, ocean play and gardening in old age, honor, vengeance, and other matters light and serious.


Cover woodcut, Cain killing Abel, by Albrecht Durer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514409763

Lewis C. Mainzer

Lewis C. Mainzer is author of Two Wives Ago: Selected Poems (2009), A Rollicking Old-Age Song: New Poems (2012), works in political science, and essays in the Massachusetts Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Yale Review. Professor of political science emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is former editor of Polity, the journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association.

Book preview

The Navigator

Through waters of childhood and youth, safely he sailed

Then navigated rocky sharps of war

Surviving ordeals that swallowed up his comrades

Good mariner, he journeyed gracefully through university and marriage

And travelled well the narrows of work and deep waters of fatherhood

Now the shoals of age and rapids of illness, boiling waters, threaten

And the vessel, scraped and a little rusting, rattles on stormy days

But carries on, credit to its upright crew

Honored among fellow craft, by all of whom saluted

With promise of friendly welcome at a glistening white sandy beach

Where well-earned shouts of praise cry out: Well done! worthy mariner

A safe landing awaits you.

I

LOVE

Elizabeth Renounced

I will not leave you, even for Elizabeth Bennet

despite my threat to do so all these years

while you never answered with references to Darcy

It was you, after all, who introduced me to her

and invited Jane Austen in as guest and more

We have read of Elizabeth in book form more than once

and heard her speak repeatedly on tape

and seen her depicted in video cassettes

–some better than others in showing Lizzy as she truly is–

and you know that I find her irresistible

yet you have for so long forgiven me this disloyalty

and borne my errant passion with such good grace

that finally I have relented, I renounce her

I want to tell you after all these years

that not even for Elizabeth Bennet would I leave you

Nothing less than death will tear me from your side.

The Story

I know that story well

for I’ve heard it a hundred times

yet I love to hear you tell

it, though it has no meter or rhymes

There’s no great truth it reveals

or secret message it’s sending

no hurt or harm that it heals

or romance with a happy ending

I love that story so well

because it carries the mark of your voice

as one that you love to tell

I love it for being your choice.

United

You are not invited,

my wife, pretending firmness, said

when I appeared to nap beside her

a little after 4 P.M.,

setting aside a task that had engaged me.

Well, here I am, I said,

not at all discouraged,

the way to you is always clear,

though I do feel somewhat slighted.

Then, resting easily, duties now deferred

we two, never seeking to affront each other

other than in clearly playful jest

are, as a million times before

content in genial silence, reunited.

Exit

Stay healthy! she pleads