Poetry for Left-Sided Angel

Left-Sided Angel to Its Critics (1995)

By Ann Struthers

And if I am an angel in decent,

perhaps fallen, in some of its senses,

What did you expect? A neon halo?

Wings with feathers from a dancer’s boa?

These are hard times for the spirit—too much

of everything, too much money, lunches

on the university’s tab, cocktail

patio parties where the whiners impale

olives and gerkins. stab colleagues

between the shoulder blades, slice up their friends,

roast their students over ruby charcoal,

resident novelist, in Mark Twain cool

whites, threatens to put John in his next book—

as a slimy minor character. Look

at yourselves. Who’s unimpared, whole? Surprised,

I watch you watch me through your log clogged eyes.

Petition to Remove a Statue (1990)

By Neal Bowers

Hunk of shrapnel!

Pile of mangled bronze!

We want him down from his one-foot poise.

Victory should be maimed

but beautiful, not banged-up

with barely a leg to stand on.

One wing clipped, the other gone,

how he deforms the whole environment,

warps the air itself with absences.

If sculpture is pure form,

or its pursuit, then this nightmare

comes as close to art

as any freeway accident,

with us out in the bushes

looking for the missing limbs.

We want to make him whole,

in his own perfect image; we want

him far less human than he is;

but since we cannot heal him,

and since he wears our wounds so openly, by God,

we’ll have this unright angel down!