Bremen

PigPen Theatre Co., Philadelphia, October 2, 2017

The Lyft driver called his wife twice. The first time,
she said their nephew had gone. Taken all his stuff
and gone. The driver coughed; when we asked,

he said smoker’s cough. The second time he told her
he’d be home soon, he could pick up cigarettes
on the way, this portly man with smoker’s cough

and a SEPTA uniform. He dropped us off
across the Schuylkill in an industrial district,
and this could be a parable, but we were just

going to a concert, and backstory’s important,
don’t you think? This could be a parable:
the band set up right there in the audience,

under the cafe’s warm lights, and if they play “Bremen”
I’m going to die, you said, three-part harmony
fairy-tale Bremen with a brown dog and a hen,

a banjo gallivanting above the guitar and a gauzy,
generous accordion. We were freshmen, then,
and we’re still friends, but we drifted apart,

I don’t know why. It was a fairy-tale world:
a boy had just asked me out; I was giddy
with the opening chords of false love.

This is a poem about a loss of innocence,
but it’s not what you expect. In “Bremen,”
the animals sing for their supper in the freest

of the freest lands, and of course the land isn’t
free and they’re robbed of all their money.
Neither of us is very political. We’re the sci-fi dorks

who fight with foam swords, not even
the metaphoric swords of “justice” and “free speech,”
but real, bona fide foam swords. Our college

is a bubble, though of course it’s not really free.
But in this parable, they were playing “Bremen,”
and we took the train home, and next morning

I saw America again, a concert of coughs and clapping
bullets in Las Vegas, 58 people killed, and so I set out
to write a poem about it, and in the intervening two years

nothing has really changed, though I’ve taken Lyft
a few more times, broken up with a boy, broken various
poetic rules, and improved my skill with foam swords.

Reuben Gelley Newman ‘21
Swarthmore College