Marx

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Marx came to know much of Shakespeare by heart - and used it to good effect, salting and peppering his adult writings with apt quotations and analogies from the plays. “His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters,” Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue recalled. “His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist.”

-- Francis Wheen, “Karl Marx: A Life”

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July 7, 1988

I have turned another old diary entry into a poem. This one is from July 7, 1988.

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Mother, like many, like me, liked dreams:
You can feel like a deep mystical seer
Bespeaking visions transported on moonbeams.

She's especially excited by this one;
She has dreamed it once, twice, and thrice,
So what she dreamed is as good as done.

But what a sorry dream she dreamed!
A tale of violence against her son.
Thrilled for something thus themed?

And it was her other son, the white one,
My half-brother from another father,
The pretty boy she loves second to none.

Jack gets beat up is all that she said,
Not by who or how many, nor why, or how bad,
Pretty thin for a thrice unfolded dream.

Then, as if to add to a pleasant meme,
She says I too will get beaten and demeaned,
But this must be more fiction than dream.

Since Jack can't be left worse off then me,
I am conveniently added to the scheme,
Battered, bruised, maybe tied to a tree.

But here is the thing for me to rue:
It is the last part that came true!

-- e. e. monk