As the children play
I sit on the summer grass
They are the flowers
Reach down, grasp firmly
and pull the weeds from the earth
Lest they continue
Even as the sun
hangs high above this green world
it is falling down
Nighttime approaches
the children are growing tired
Tomorrow will rise
And I will remain
rooted to place and people
Endlessly blooming.
Assignment: Why I love poetry…in 153 words or less
I don’t really love Poetry and so
I can’t write a poem answering
why I love her in 153 words or less,
(or more, for that matter).
What Poetry and I have is superficial
and raw. It’s a carnal thing,
especially when we’re at a party and
Poetry looks at me from across the room
as though we’ve never met.
Then, when she lifts her chin
and purses her red, moist lips,
I get her out the door fast and,
there in the hall or out in the car,
poetry and I tear each other’s clothes off
and come together with heat and spark.
And we burn.
Later we go our separate ways, Poetry and I,
embarrassed and unwilling to speak of it.
Days pass. I work at my job while Poetry lies
naked on a beach rubbing oil all over herself.
Soon I come to stand on the beach,
blocking her sun until she beckons me.
What Poetry and I have isn’t love,
but it will do. It will do nicely.
At night lying against no one’s bare body
he listens to the sounds of the others
playing in the street, shouting,
calling each other’s names, and
exchanging secrets they keep from him.
Later, after everyone has gone to bed
he lies still against no one’s bare body
conjuring the faces and the soft touch
of a hand, an arm, the curve of a back,
and the smile that hides nothing from him.
The moon and stars outside his window
go round the sky while he waits
wrapping himself in no one’s bare body
wondering how it is for the others
when everything is impossible to him.
He lies in bed, awake and shaken,
Imagining a life for himself and
Dreaming shadows into being
A bare body waiting next to him,
her arms reaching out to hold him
through the darkness of night.
Iraqi cities
lit by fires all through the night
reflected in blood.
Ice covered branches
hang over silver slicked streets
reflecting the past
Wiping steam from the
mirror, a face stares at me.
I used to know him.
Standing quietly
Let us pause for reflection
And lower him down
or about Bush and Cheney
Some things are about
more important things
such as the smiles on
my little girls' faces and
the chances that they
will overcome the forces
set in motion by the
likes of Bush and Cheney.
Some things aren't about the war,
they are even more important.
It only seems like it won’t.
Not even the rocks
or the desert are forever,
they only seem so
when measured against
the brief flash of our lives,
and of our ancestors on
down the lines of our blood.
The war in Iraq will end,
it’s just that it has gone on
so much longer than the lives
it has cut short. It will end when
we snuff out the ragged flame
of the lone candle held
in the trembling hands
of the only man who still believes
in impossible victory.
The war in Iraq will end.
(submitted to Poets Against War)
They hung Saddam Hussein this week
for a few of the thousand evils he had done.
The newspaper here ran a headline
two inches high, as if we had won
and I imagine that there are many
who feel something has now been done,
that some wrong has been righted.
I saw a link to a video of his hanging
but decided instead to write these lines
because, though I know he was a bad man
I can’t help feeling a connection of some kind
to that man with rope around his neck
at the will of masked men behind him in a line
so sure that revenge is somehow righteous.
Saddam is dead now and silent
Violence, it seems, begets only violence
and still more violence.
