Lodestar Quarterly

Lodestar Quarterly
Figure reaching for a star Issue 11 • Fall 2004 • Featured Writer • Poetry

Sons of Onan

David Bergman

All the children I never had are happy,
having known only this: the joyous moment
of their coming forth--my great orgasmic O,
a bon voyage to blissful oblivion.
I drape them like an opal brooch on your chest
or cast them like pearls across your thigh and think:
no jewel of greater price has found a better
setting. Clouds floating above a lake, they drift
until you, their sky, either roll into sleep
or rise to wash yourself spotless for the dawn.

David Bergman

David Bergman is a professor of English at Towson State University, the author of Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Representation in American Literature, and the editor of Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality. Bergman has published poetry in The Paris Review, The New Criterion, and The New Republic. He has edited a collection of Edmund White's essays entitled The Burning Library. His latest book is The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004). He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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