to w

[aptsvet]

dear sir the potent potus of this land
your jealous god is thunderous and windy
whom when you pester for your daily bread
pray some that we could also have our weekly

think of us when you suck your daily thumb
in your oval playground blind to all omens
once the amazing city of new orleans
now we are dust behold us and be dumb

let freedom ring by babylon’s rivers maybe
but somewhere in your realm a screw is loose
all water gone we’re down to our last babies
since they seem to be of no further use

Comments

[larvatus.livejournal.com]

I am drawing a blank trying to parse the second half of the first quatrain. My feeble mind keeps hoping for a verb taking the aforementioned pronoun for its direct object, and "some" as its subject, e.g. "beg" instead of "pray". Unless you mean "you" as its subject, in which case I am stymied by the grammatical role of "some" -- a dialectal adverb, perhaps? Would that we had stronger inflection.

[aptsvet.livejournal.com]

I am trying to pull a syntactic double entendre here, the way I do in my Russian poems. It is possible that I am still not deft enough to do it in English properly within its own rules. 'Some' is definitely an adverb here, as in 'give some'. I will wait to see how Philip reacts to this before any tinkering. The two lines in question are supposed to mean: when you pester (him) for your daily bread, pray a bit for our weekly.

[larvatus.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The pronominal transformation of "when you pester him" into "whom when you pester" threw me off. I like this sort of difficulty.