Warmup kick serve
Bali chill ambience
Background prancing
Like rock star strutted
Stuff in half-filled arena
Ball off both sides racket
Shank didn’t touch strings
Lob slice chip thought would
Nada sit up as glances over net
So tell me something I don’t know
about guns ‘n’ butter bread ‘n’ butter.
Down under
Australian Open
Young self-starter’d
Never demonstrated
Tennis outside of USA
(Plus now is being paid)
Bageled* his round of 16
Foe before is Manhattaned**
With short reply by clutch ripped
Charismatic veteran perhaps all of
25 got stranglehold not relinquished.
Prescient teen
Dedicated his run
To the memory of
Jewish predecessor
Who though won both
This tourney & Wimbledon
But snubbed by white shoe
Gentiles then controlled Davis
Cup player selections ’cause of
What they considered Dick Savitt’s
Unkosher faith – may he rest in peace***.
*6–0, 6-0, 6-0
**6-2, 6-1, 6-2
*** 4March1927– 6January2023
Gerard Sarnat has been nominated for the pending Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Star Award, won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of 2021 and previous Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in 2022-2023 San Diego Poetry Annual, 2022 Awakenings Review, 2022 Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County Celebration, 2022 Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology, The Broken City, Sandy River Review, Three Rooms Press/Maintenant, New World Writing, The Font, BigCityLit, HitchLit Review, Lowestoft, Washington Square Review, The Deronda Review, Jewish Writing Project, Hong Kong Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Arkansas Review, Hamilton-Stone Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by NYU, Slippery Rock, Northwestern, Pomona, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, University of British Columbia and University of Chicago and University of Virginia presses. He is a Harvard College and Medical School-trained physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with progeny consisting of four collections (Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham To Burning Man, Disputes, 17s, Melting the Ice King) plus three kids/six grandsons—and is looking forward to potential future granddaughters.
Main Squeeze Literary Journal 