WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW and other poems – Zack Rogow

3 new, unpublished poems by Zack Rogow

What the World Needs Now

for Hal David, Burt Bacharach, and Jackie DeShannon

What the world needs now is an electric car with fins

What the world needs now is a loosey-goosey interpretation of the most sacred books

What the world needs now is a way to live many lives simultaneously

What the world needs now is a whole country just for elephants and their trusted companions

What the world needs now is a villanelle you can rock out to

Freedom What the world needs now is freedom ringing from Badaling Mountain in China to Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to Denali in Alaska to Mount Elbrus in Russia

What the world needs now is a tofu recipe that tastes as good as a medium-rare burger just off the grill

What the world needs now is a glue that can fasten Monday onto Saturday and Sunday

What the world needs now is a cigarette that cures cancer

What the world needs now is a Frisbee that can turn 90 degrees

What the world needs now is for everyone to stop running the water when they brush their teeth—it would saves lives—I’m not sure how but I know it would

What the world needs now is Marilyn Monroe in a flannel shirt and construction worker boots

What the world needs now is a way to play back our dreams

What the world needs now is love sweet love

At least that’s what I need

You Have Someone Else’s Name

Manet and Monet—

how unlikely is that?

But it’s only yeasted from there:

one blues great called Etta James,

another named Etta Jones.

And they both sang

“Don’t Go to Strangers.”

Not to mention one of my favorite actors, Maggie Smith,

with exactly the same name as the poet Maggie Smith.

As for my name,

there’s already a Zach Rogowski on Facebook,

a handsome devil

with his arm around with his beaming wife.

It’s only a matter of time

before I Google my moniker

and a total stranger stares back.

A name used to make a body stand apart,

to last longer than this machine of flesh.

Now it’s just something we share,

like our favorite salted caramel whatever.

Everything we hold dear is borrowed,

even our names,

those rented ice skates,

and one day,

when our ankles are sore and the cold

has warmed our cheeks,

we will have to give them back.

Dayenu

Dayenu: The refrain from a song in the Passover seder that means, “It would have been
enough.”

If there had been only stars with their stitches of light and no planets—that would have been enough

If there had been only lifeless planets with strands of quartz and gold—Dayenu

If there had been just the breathing oceans vaulting against boulders

Only microorganisms with their endless division and multiplication

If there had been only forests of coral

Merely the minnows their tiny hearts flicking inside glass bodies

If there had been only the firefish the butterfly fish and seahorses disguised as kelp

Only the desert and its runnels of sand

Just green beards of grass and no redwoods

If there had been only black onyx no lemon serpentine no azurite

Only the insects with their x-ray wings and flashing songs

Just the geometry of snake skins and no mammals

Only gray mice their hearts valving six hundred times a minute

If there had been nothing but a hummingbird pinning itself in midair

Only the elephant with its vault of bones only the zebra so unaware of its own beauty

Only monkeys chattering their no language—that would have been enough

Only the first humans weighing their young in their arms—Dayenu

Only that and not the peacock domes of Isfahan

Not the “Mood Indigo” of Ella’s Ellington album

Or the white stone garden of Ryoanji Temple where no viewer can view every dark rock

No broken torso of Apollo

Or acts of love beyond number

Would it really have been enough?

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His eighth book of poems, Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music, was published in 2015 by Kattywompus Press. He is also writing a series of plays about authors, incorporating their writing into the action. The most recent of these, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in February 2015. He is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the U.S.A., The Face of Poetry, from University of California Press. Currently he teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. www.zackrogow.com

Featured image: Photo by Teri Allen Piccolo.