This is not your mother or your grandmother’s
Narnia. Wardrobe? Given over to Marantz.
White witches? Joplins. Fauns all Robert Plants.
Every moon dark-sided, every brick another’s
wall; sweet Lucy, Susan, and the Blitz-fled brothers
based and taut as Flea in underpants;
that old, deep magic as a Woodstock danse—
watchtowered while one Jimi Hendrix covers
Bob. Dawn treads the sullen-sounding sea—
catastrophic loss of childhood,
kiddie parable to Judas kiss,
Lord’s lion sacrificed to Man’s IP.
The truth? The books were never very good.
But, even bad, each better still than this.