PAD Day 23: Dylan, Captain America, and Fighting Poets

 Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a poem with the title "Heart of the _______" or "______ of the Heart."

NPWM: "...  write a poem about, or involving, a superhero..."

PSH: "Write a poem that records a dialogue between two famous poets arguing a point of controversy. "

I combined prompts two and three to write a poem based on a lyric from what is probably my favorite Bob Dylan song, a fever dream of a fantasy narrative featuring a wide cast of characters, including two famous poets. (The superhero enters only in the last stanza. And admittedly, it gets a bit silly with a rather serious subject.)

Clash of the Poets
 
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn,
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower…
—Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
 
Part of the charm of that song
is the dizzying anachronisms
and unlikely intersections of characters
like Cinderella and Romeo.
Eliot and Pound weren’t on the Titanic,
and in fact didn’t meet until 1914.
What’s more, they were good friends—
Ezra helped Tom edit The Waste Land.
But they could have clashed over politics—
both were American ex-pats,
but Pound moved to Italy and embraced fascism.
Eliot, a bit of an antisemite himself,
nevertheless had no love for brownshirts,
and there might have laid the rub.
 
So for the sake of setting, leave them on the Titanic,
scrapping in the control room:
“I can’t believe you support Hitler!”
“Well, you don’t love the Jews any more than I do!”
“I won’t be a party to genocide!”
“Who cares? I never liked your poetry anyway!
‘Ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas’?
What does that even mean?”
“ Well, how about ‘petals on a wet black bough’? Seriously?”
 
And here Dylan could introduce another character:
Then in bounds Captain America,
He’s just polished up his shield,
And says to Pound, “I think you’re Red Skull,
You’d better yield….”

(I"ll circle back to do the "heart" prompt later.)