DEATH AND THE SUN

                            —after Mahon

French poet Rochefoucault said you can not
stare at the Sun—or at Death, either.

Camus stared at Death til he took a tram
to the hot beach and burned himself, naked

as he swam as far out as he could go.
Til his breath left him, with a broken neck

off a fast coast road, dead to the Death
whine of the cicadas in the headlights

of his broken car, waiting for the plague,
the rats, the Death smell on the wind.

Hemingway faced the noon day Sun and Death
in the afternoon bull rings of Madrid.

He would gorge on suckling pig
and get Dead drunk on Rioja Alta at Casa Botin.

Once at La Floridita he drank 17 mojitos and swam
to his fishing boat holding his trousers to the Sun.

After the plane crash, The Little Prince lived
on tiny asteroid B612 where he could watch

Sun rise 34 times a day til one day
on number 33 he became bored—

to Death and warned Narrator to not watch
him Die, to seek another star.

Ten men and women chained in Plato’s cave
could only see shadows. Socrates asked

if they wanted to see the Sun
but they said No the bright light would kill them.

Mike Lewis-Beck writes from Iowa City.  He has pieces in American Journal of Poetry, Apalachee Review, Blue Collar Review, Cortland Review, Chariton Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Ekphrastic Review, Guesthouse, Heavy Feather Review, Inquisitive Eater,Pilgrimage, Pennine Platform,  Southword, and Wapsipinicon Almanac, among other venues. He has a book of poems, Rural Routes, published by Alexandria Quarterly.