Featured Poet: Ben Mazer

Eyewear is pleased to feature dazzlingly clever American poet Ben Mazer (pictured) for a special Fourth of July post.  Mazer's two new collections of poems are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Landis Everson's Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). He lives in Boston where he is a contrbuting editor to Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

Clouds

My father is the one I loved the most.

The clouds are sweeping and the holy host

of clouds are weeping on the picnic grounds

where the alarming sirens pierce the clouds

and dampen the rockets sputtering on their rounds

where those before me saunter in their shrouds

as the electric sailor is struck dead

and bobs towards mainland. Soldiers fetch his head

and the words spread over the ground without a sound

that whistles through the whistling where I found

him waiting there to carry in his arms

the wounded through the flashing of the storms.

poem by Ben Mazer