Poem by Gabriel Meyer

Bagatelle on the Death of Virgil            
 
The rector, muttering, on the run,
The blazing lane, the crisp soutane,
 
Mortalita
on a summer’s mind,
Each tear according to its kind,
 
Hoists a black umbrella
Against the brilliant nuisance of the sun.

Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. He was especially acclaimed for his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada and of the Bosnian war. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He has published poetry and two novels and is writing a long-term project, The Testimony of Stones, a “biography” of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. His book-length poetry cycle, A Map of Shadows, was published by Tebot Bach Press in 2012.  He is currently editing a collection of his Bosnian war poetry entitled Dreaming of Wheat. He lives in Los Angeles and is the executive director of the Ruskin Art Club (founded 1888), the city’s oldest arts association.

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