Michael Salcman
Michael Salcman Poems
Like immortal cells growing in a dish
the alien swans multiply beyond our wish
for silent beauty. And the buried day rises as a dream
how to kill the mute swans its theme,
...
My father always carried a penknife
to pare his green apples, raising their skins
in perfect spirals. He never drew blood
slicing his bananas for breakfast,
...
From where they were hiding, my Father said
you could see the truck ride out in the morning,
men and shovels packed in its bed, the guards
...
Shades and graces come in threes: my cousins in Queens
were aunt and uncle to me,
the first I knew as elderly
rich with sandpapered faces
...
Auden was right—our buildings grope
the sky for certainty but are dumb
and blind. In the fierce limbus of my eye
the plummeting birds burn still,
...
Outside the morgue on First
and Thirtieth street, a canopy
has been erected next to
three truck loads of mixed body parts.
...
I'm only half-asleep so I know you're standing there
wondering if I'm asleep. Nope.
It's not easy to rest under this table—
for one thing, there's a strong downward slope
...
Michael Salcman Biography
MICHAEL SALCMAN (b.1946) : in addition to poetry, he served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1949. He started writing poetry at Midwood High School in Brooklyn and was published in little magazines in the 1970s. He entered the combined program in liberal arts and medical education at Boston University and received both his B.A. and M.D. magna cum laude in 1969. After a surgical internship he was a Fellow in Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and trained in neurosurgery at Columbia University's Neurological Institute. He is the author of 200 scientific and medical papers and six textbooks. After a 10 year hiatus he started writing poetry in the mid-1980s and attended the summer writing program at Sarah Lawrence College under the mentorship of Thomas Lux. His poems have appeared in numerous fine journals such as Arts & Letters, Cafe Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Poet Lore, and Raritan. His first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (2007) , was nominated for The Poets Prize by Dick Allen, his third, A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016) , won the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and his fourth, Shades & Graces: New Poems (2020) , was the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize. His New & Selected Poems, Necessary Speech appeared in 2022.)
The Best Poem Of Michael Salcman
A Lamentation Of Swans
Like immortal cells growing in a dish
the alien swans multiply beyond our wish
for silent beauty. And the buried day rises as a dream
how to kill the mute swans its theme,
one Tchaikovsky never penned,
is now debated in shore side bars and fens
by oystermen who lift their glasses in sad farewell
to black skimmers and underwater grasses;
they mourn the native tundra swan
and the least tern before it too is gone,
and if alien beauty must be trapped or shot
or poisoned, its nested eggs addled not
to hatch, they're willing to concede
how often beauty breeds dark necessity.
Michael Salcman Comments
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3/14/2026 7:07:43 AM # 1.0.0
