My mother and father rasied me
to believe that on Easter Sunday
He rose from the dead.
My wife is raising our children
to believe that He has yet to come
down to this Earth and save us.
Me, I believe in soft green grass
rising again from the brown earth
and in this blue sky arcing over me.
Each day is holy and the sky is infinite.
I turn my face up into it and smile
as if the warm sun were the face of God.
the birth of morning
a song sung in the tree tops
by Spring’s heralds
chills hang still in air
as trees show their first new buds
but snow is coming
will this life continue
or die under April snow
only the Earth knows
nonetheless birds sing
their overture to warm Spring
whis’ling through graveyards.
David Shumate is alone in his basement typing at his computer and smelling the vinegar he diluted with water and then used to mop his floor. He is writing about me in my basement smelling vinegar and tapping on this keyboard. He’s composing another of his prose poems, this time about my wish to do this full-time, to quit my teaching job and provide for my family through words on a page. David Shumate will publish that prose poem in a book that will come out this summer. It will win an award and he will appear on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. Housewives across the nation will buy the book and sit at kitchen tables to read the prose poem on page forty-seven about me in this basement. They will smell the diluted vinegar on their own floors. Each woman will close her eyes and imagine making all my dreams come true.
Morning dogs wake happy, their tails already
beating out the pulse of the new day
while their owners, awakened in the dark,
stumble out of bed, into clothes, down
to the kitchen and the pot of coffee.
The morning dogs are already by the door
dreaming of adventures and release
while their owners use the bathroom and
find shoes, a coat, hat and gloves, and
reluctantly open the door on the new day.
The morning dogs accept the indignity of
the leash but pull their owners forward,
leading them to special hidden places,
wondrous scents and just right patches of grass
on which they relieve themselves.
The morning dogs don’t want to go home yet,
but they turn from further exploration,
leading their owners home, returning to the
rag rugs spread before heating vents
onto which they curl themselves.
Their owners must now face
the endless obligations of this day
and the next and the days after that.
The morning dogs sleep through until the joy
of their owners return signals another walk outside.
