Robert Cooperman

HARVARD'S UNOFFICIAL COPY OF MAGNA CARTA IS ACTUALLY AN ORIGINAL

Eighty years ago Harvard Law School
purchased it at auction for $27.50
and let what they thought was a copy

barely worth the parchment it was scrivened on
languish in a vault, the story begins.
But rather than reading how the artifact

was recently verified as one of the original
seven “Magna Cartas,” what I’m curious about
is how much it would go for today, my head

ringing like Wile E. Coyote hit by an anvil,
to think the last Original sold at auction
for twenty-one million, and how, fittingly,

all those zeroes could help Harvard battle
the current regime: trying to strip us
of Habeas Corpus: the right not to be thrown

into prison (or exile) on the whim of a man
who can snap his fingers or bark at an underling,
and have anyone he pleases, or who’s displeased him,

tossed into prison in a country that will gladly torture
or just kill the poor bastard. As for King John
signing that document, a traitor to his brother-rulers.


Gerald So's YouTube reading of "Harvard's Unofficial Copy..."


Cooperman confesses: "There's a Looney Tunes cartoon I saw as a kid: about a mountain lion and another animal (can't remember what it is, but a prey animal) chasing each other through the Grand Canyon, the former wild to eat the latter, who's wild to escape. Anyway, they manage to destroy the Canyon in about a hilarious minute. the park ranger upbraids them both with: what took Nature millions of years to create, you both destroyed in a minute, to their heads hanging in shame. Sound familiar about someone who's currently occupying the White House and what he's done to the country? Except the shame part."

ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collection is The Death and Rebirth of Ophelia, a retelling of Hamlet, with a slightly happier ending, at least for Ophelia. Steerage is the highly fictionalized story of his grandfather's misadventures on the Lower East Side of New York in the early 20th Century. An Oar for Odysseus is the final collection in Cooperman's lifelong love affair with Odysseus and The Odyssey.