No Alternative

Michael Peach

There’s no alternative,
No escape;
Only through good deeds
Can one serve God.

Thus this poem mocks its creator,
Who (dismayed by human kind)
Sits all daylong
Scribbling that truth.

Jerusalem
5 April 1992

The milk and cream of human kindness ease The bullish

Despite the ATVs and motorbikes That shake my fragile balance

Like all the kindest men’s in history, Will’s anima was

In his sonnets Will’s narrator loves a manPlatonically; for he’s

How ironic and poetically just That the blatant ethnic-cleansing And

Could anything ever persuade The fatalistic fundamentalists, Who literalize and