Encounter

We are alien to one another:
Our visage,
Our turns of phrase,
Our customs and flourishes,
Our dishes,
Our mien,
Alien is our being. 

The alien brings the fear -
And wonder;
Fear that screams and wonder quiet,
Fear that seems to trail our footsteps
And thicken the evening air,
Wonder drives our fingers outward
To touch each other's hair.

In fear our eyes avert and dart, alert.
In wonder our lips curl - a grin or smirk.

Wandering, walking in the starlight, I think
If we could touch each other's faces
We could build the safest places,
Our strife and turmoil soon to sink
In the knowing that forms our link.

Torn Veils

Winter takes the warmth from everything.
And the lush veils that hide
The eternal mysteries
Wither and fall.

The dark, jagged shape of the trees:
The monsters that walked before history.
The winter sky gray and wan:
The smoldering glow at time's dawn.

The people of the city, puppets of the stars:
Indifferent as the winds of Mars.
The people of the farm, keepers of the faith:
The lonely miles of outer space.

All the souls surrounding me await,
Like nurturing vultures,
My untimely death;
Every boon, every kind gesture,
A gentle prod on the plank at the chasm.
Your trouble does not concern us,
They imply, sly fangs dripping:
Not your aches, cares,
Fears or nightmares.

In the dream I am falling, hurling
Down the chasm filled with millions
Of falling souls, all wrapped
In a mantle of cold, and the voices
Whispering, shouting, calling:
Choices prisons make;
Memories shimmer and break;
Long days of brief sleep-
Fitful, ungrateful -
Your fury is silent and deep.

The eternal mysteries knocked and hissed:
As you failed to forgive, all those chances you missed;

As long as the days are the lines on that list,

Down the chasm of time as you tumble,

With the weight of the sadness you stumble,

As you fumble to shoulder the rock of regret –

The sentence of days that you cannot forget.

December 7, 1941

A day that will live in infamy

Drowns in the ocean of oblivion

That is our collective abandon of history. 

Old photographs of human misery

Fail to move a generation

That never grieved and never learned

What their parents failed to teach -

The ships in Pearl Harbor burn

In old and musty newspapers,

The human cries forever beyond reach.  

Seventy-two years

Have dried all the tears

A nation had once learned to shed.

The years since then

Have filled us with dread:

The screams of the war planes

In truth never ended;

While history remained unattended

Days of infamy for years descended -

We all are the Pearl Harbor dead.