Category: POETRY
Again, look up “poem” in the dictionary if you don’t recognize the word. Or, better yet, just have a look at what’s here and form your own impressions.
Granny
[expanded version of the poem 2022]
Is this a poem?
How could I tell?
Are these feelings?
Is this a life?
I recapitulate my grandmother:
Her parents were wealthy farmers in Germany
but “They didn’t like the Kaiser,”
so they moved to Nebraska — rich farmers
on good land.
Adventurous spirit, she went to college in Chicago
whence my grandfather whisked her away to Florida,
promising an agricultural wonderland.
It was!
Florida grew any/everything like magic.
She picked and dressed and cooked miracles.
I got to crank the black cast iron separator
that turned fresh milk from the cow
into milk, cream and butter.
Pop read Kipling to me
and told me of Yutch,
the idiot on the survey team
with whom he crossed the continent
and avoided World War I.
Pop taught me to fish and hunt
and let me teach myself to read.
He was a good man in a bad time.
Granny could do anything.
But then Pop died.
For a decade she traveled the world
seeing every sight and bringing home mementos
but all she really wanted to remember was him
and when that longing couldn’t be distracted
she turned to daytime TV and junk food,
renouncing her life.
Her life got even
by hanging on to her for 103 years.
Finally she refused to eat, and we let her go.
So today, after two years of plague
and a decade of undetected fascist takeover
and a lifetime of burning fossil fuels
I grow numb from watching the southern sky
for fireballs
and the news for climate catastrophe
and daytime TV starts to appeal
and junk food starts to look good
and I’m tired of being ashamed
for doing too little to stop this
and I wonder when I’ll stop eating.
(20 March 2022)
Forty
They say that life begins at forty.
No. Life’s beginning now,
and now again – and there’s another!
For now, and now again, chase
the next beginning, to embrace
its lessons and adventures: now
itself will love and teach you how
to flow along from memory
of history to destiny.
(For Rebecca’s 40th birthday, 04 May 2023)
Eirenicon
I do believe we can get along fine
and turn our standoff into a waltz
if you speak your truth, and I speak mine,
and we both remember they’re probably false.
Eirenicon: A proposal to resolve disputes and reconcile differences in order to advance peace, strengthen or establish unity, or foster solidarity.
(06 July 2023)
Adolescent Male
I hate preachy poems. Don’t we all?
But is this even poetry? These days,
how can one decide? It seems to fall
to each of us to choose our favorite ways
of jumping out of prosody and call
those “poems” and thus worthy of our praise.
To suit my tastes, I’ve thrown in meter and
a painfully simple sampling of rhyme,
as if I hoped to form a little band
and sell this tripe as musically sublime.
In truth, I craft a vehicle so bland
it won’t divert you from the point this time.
When we are young and running in the race
to reproduce more quickly than the rest,
hormones fuel lust for hair and face
and legs and arms and clitoris and breast
until the glans is sheathed and thrusting’s pace
increases to the climax and the test:
Tomorrow, will you stay or will you go
looking for another place to plant
your seeds? Imperatives of nature know
their preference; are you recalcitrant?
Have had enough of planting? Will you show
that you can love as well as sweat and pant?
Later it gets easier to stay
as endocrine compulsions fade away.
(21 Sep 2021)
Mock Wild Boar
My German granny’s recipe
is something beautiful to see.
The title tells a vivid story
of a hunter’s quest for glory:
the feral tuskers were too big
to kill, so he brought home a pig.
The dinner party had been told
of wild boar, like in days of old.
He begged his wife to make it so
alike that none of them would know.
She reassured him, “Fret not, dear,
they’ll never know it’s pig this year.”
Prick a whole ham, freshly killed,
all over; rub with spices, filled
with pepper, thyme, allspice and bay,
with garlic, salt and caraway;
then marinate in red wine, brandy,
vinegar, olive oil if handy.
Add some onions, orange zest,
celery, carrots and the rest,
and let it sit at least a week,
turning daily, till it reek
of wildness. Then you roast it brown
and become the talk of any town!
World of Hurt
“Hurt people hurt people,” say the shrinks,
envisioning a chain of links
passing the hurt on down the chain,
each enduring equal pain.
I think each link connects to many,
“In for a pound, if in for a penny!”
So some disburse a world of hurt
while others wear a horsehair shirt.
The world is wrapped in a web of hate.
Can we escape? It looks too late.
But each of us gets to decide
how much hurt we will provide
and how much love, and to how many
we will give how much, if any.
The web connects us either way,
tomorrow, now and yesterday.
The Poet Grows Old
My big words desert me, and with them
my thoughts, forever truncated by
diversions shiny or even drab.
I don’t mind so much losing track
of why I came into the kitchen
or how to integrate a gaussian,
but there is still so much that needs saying
and I have to fall back on simple
everyday words.
Driving home alone
I find myself screaming obscenities
at inane radio hosts and other drivers
because they can’t hear me and
I have rage I need to express
somehow.
Perhaps that’s what needs saying.
(January 6, 2024: my birthday, Christmas Day in Russia, and the 3rd anniversary of the day democracy stumbled in the USA)
On Poetry
Confusing Muse:
rhyme & time –
clues to choose
make me take
a newer view –
& grow ’em poems!
Narcissus is us!
Double trouble:
viciously ambitious, we
Say, display,
auspicious, capricious,
obscenely preen,
malicious, fictitious
and claim the fame.
14 November 2023
Head Crash
Today I mourn the corpse of my corpus:
The work of a lifetime, lost to a glitch.
A power-fail head-crash erased the enormous
collection of all I have done. “Life’s a bitch,
and then you die,” so goes the meme.
But I had intended my work to survive
long after I’m dead, so that it might seem
that some of my essense might still be alive.
Goodbye 787 Quips,
hundreds of papers and invited cants,
22 Stories with rejection slips,
56 poems, 31 Rants. . .
OMG, is that the summation
of all I’ve accomplished in 78 years?
What are my choices in this situation:
Start over now, or just drown in my tears?
30 November 2023
(No, it hasn’t really happened… yet!)
Other
Other folks in other places suffer,
I’m told today on TV by the News.
It overflows my empathetic buffer
and makes me glad I’m not in their sad shoes.
They know, the entertainment media,
the numbing, callous, cynical effect
of the tragedy encyclopedia
inflicted daily as our world is wrecked.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” they say with knowing smiles.
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
We all are plunging into climate trials,
and they will have to die and suffer too.
(13 September 2023)
Caviar
Swim, my silver beauty, swim!
Follow me to river’s source.
Do not make your bed with him,
though he move gravel with more force.
Lay your eggs upon the sand
and guard their orange splendor there
while I employ my milty gland,
shuddering sideways in our lair.
And when the procreation’s done,
when you and I are tired and tattered,
our flesh will nourish everyone;
our lives will then have truly mattered.
For now, we dream of alevins, fry
and darting schools of speckled smolts
who someday will return to die
here too like loving thunderbolts.
(24 September 2023)