Corona Haiku III

Cloudless sunset sky,
Suggesting hope and questions -
Alone on a walk.

Dead Stars

No friendship can be safe 
From the destructive power of time,
From the curse of fading memory, 
From the poison of indifference. 

Our telephone line may bridge
The distance of the daunting miles.
But no bridge was built to cross
The distance of the daunting years.

To keep at bay deep fears
We pretend our friendship holds. 
But no denial can fill the loss
Of the trust we once held dear.

Courage it takes to see it clear:
The passion of youth does end,
That joy that we cherished -
That friendship won't perish - 
Lost when the road did wend
Far to the left and far to the right:
We walked our own paths,
Soon lost to sight.

If the child in you and the child in me
Should one day meet in your memory,
Tell them both to always sing
Of the joy and the excitement
In a future we held in awe;
Tell them both to always cling
To the vision of companionship 
In a future we thought we saw.

For across the sky the darkness falls:
On the sand alone I count my scars,
Your echo faint and then it stalls -
A friend like the light of long dead stars.

Worldwide Web

You can project
Your content here:
Your hope, your fear. 

This space can be
Your preferred candidate,
Your Superman,
Your Jesus. 

What you want me to be, I cannot,
Because I already am. 

In my mind there is a land
Where we can walk together.
Flowers in a field gathered;
Like us, they sway and dance,
Sprung from seeds scattered
By the fickle winds of chance.

 

 

Walking

I can't say your name.
Because I don't know you.
Wherever you are.

Did you think
That you would find me
One day,
I wonder sometimes

When I wander
In this city or the next,
With the sidewalks branching
Right and left.

The stretches of time:
Sometimes I notice the years.
But mostly the seasons.

Still, I never know who I will meet
Around the bend in the street.

World Water

United Nations:
Two words that sound
Like the harmony of chimes,
The choral burst that climbs
To the celestial winds
That soothe the world to sleep.

The report could hardly keep
The hope in unity alive
As the people of the world strive
To pull clean water from the deep.

The World Water Report for 2015
Said rare is the water that is pure, pristine:
One billion people defecate in the open.
About two billion drink their water
With fecal contamination.

Certain is the damnation
That awaits the United Nations
For each poor girl that treks
To the arid well for filthy water
That once drunk will surely wreck
The body of her hopeful mother.

Grace

This is the boon of time;
It creates a distance in the mind,
A space of grace
And possibility:
That you may not be a slave
To the past,
That your pain is not obliged to last
But fade by grades,
And the tell-tale tears
Vanish in the years.

December 24, 1914

Before the bitterness, before the hatred,
Before spawning the beast
That must be sated,
In the horror of every war since,
Came the peace on Christmas Eve. 

Few could then believe
The German call heard in the night
Across the blasted waste of No Man's Land.
The British and Germans dared to stand
Atop their trenches, within sight,
And, walking, met halfway in brief reprieve.

Though comical the call,
"We no shoot!" opened the door to all:
To sing old carols, "Stille Nacht, Heilinge Nacht,"
To hear a band play "God Save the King,"
To give as gift every simple thing -
Wine and cigarettes,
Bully beef and biscuits -
To share a human night is all they sought
And a game of soccer with a makeshift ball.

By Christmas the following year
All of the players had killed each other,
Bringing on the helpless, hopeless tears
Of British and German mothers.
French mothers, too, clutched their damp letters
From sons who believed, in December 1914,
That life could be better.

Gone are the trenches; gone are the fences.
Gone are the days a solider could see
The enemy's faces.

Our enemy bears no love
For our yuletide traditional ways.
And still we rain death from above
On the enemy's most holy days.

So let us pray today
For the youth of that children's crusade,
The ones who had glimpsed on that night
That another kind world could be made.

Dust

We parted on an old road

near the edge of a small town,

its name forgotten.  

The bus, rattling softly,

raised a cloud of dust

as it faded into memory.  

I remember the pasture

where we escaped the dust

raised by the passing wind. 

In the middle of the pasture

sat the copse of trees,

the remains of an ancient forest.   

We would go into the trees

and pick berries from vines,

wondering if we could eat them.  

His was a strange face

in that strange country,

more open, more knowing.

But his name was lost to the years. 

In those days

our souls were still growing,

our innocence showing

the faith that those moments

would not fade away.

New Year

When the traces of frost are gone,
In the light of a new year's dawn,
From my dusty window pane,
And the morning still is broken
By the ice from branches falling,
As if the earth itself were calling,
The briefest answer spoken,
To my silent, doubtful prayer:
The old year another layer
In the fallow fields of hope -
Whence the strength to note
If the day to mind can bring
The seeds of a brilliant spring:
A new way to see,
A new way to hear,
A new way to pull the plough
Through the fear
And bring a blossom of hope
To the fledgling year. 

There, in the dripping sound
Of the crystal branches
Lay the answer clear:
Like the branches guiding flowers,
The mind holds silent power
To lead its thoughts to joy
Or to pathways of despair.

Therefore, have a care
And seek the three-fold path
For every tender thought:
Is it needed?
Is it kind?
Is it true?
If this counsel then were heeded,
Tomorrow we may find
The world each day is new.

 

 

 

Suddenly

There is a thing that we do
To get on with our days, we do.
We hope.
Though we don’t know
That we hope.

On the other side of that slope,

Will I see you tomorrow
At this time?
And if not, what will I find?

Phone calls unanswered,

Letters returned –
I did not know enough to learn
The name of your mother,
Or some friend or other,
To ask where you had gone.

Impression at Dusk

The sun had set without notice.
The winter dusk wrapped the street corner in purple dust.
At the bus stop, four people stood, swayed, waited,
Different shapes and colors, all wrapped in long coats,
In the noise of passing blue sedans and brown taxis
Rushing past the green light.
At the red light, the thrum of tense engines,
Waiting 60 seconds, then rushing,
Transporting drivers away,
To torments and delights,
Real and imagined.
.
.
What can I know?
What ought I to do?
For what may I hope?
.
.
The patter of expensive leather shoes
On the leaf-strewn, dusty pavement
Is scarcely heard
Before the rumble, screech, and gasp of the city bus,
Full of torpid, wool-covered strangers.
The bus blasts off, like an ugly starship
Into the gathering darkness.
Destination: the muzzled, muffled
Thoughts of aliens.

When the dust cloud settles,
A thin plume of exhaust curls around the empty bus stop,
A brief moment of silence - the sweetest sound - unnoticed,
Like the sunset,
And the sinking moral ground,
And the sense that we are bound
To see meaning in sound and color,
And in human horror,
After the bus has gone around
The bend.

New Year's Eve

December is the cruelest month
When the old folks, impatient
For their children's plane to land,
Wrap themselves in cloaks of memories
And sink into the dead land;

When I examine my intentions
By the weakened winter light -
What was a January hope
In the embers fades from sight.

What I could have done
But I never did,
As the year has come to end,
I carry to the new year still
Like a sack with my back bent.

But it is true, that we two
Did walk that summer night.
Hand in hand, we took our stand
Against time's relentless might.

For you and I gazed at the sky,
At the twinkling light of dead stars,
We our hallowed moment vowed to keep
Bright like our beating young hearts.

Though you have gone
At year's cold end,
The memories I take with me.
Into the future new hopes I send
That you may yet await me.

Discorporation

There are times
I want to discorporate
Into my component parts –
Not lungs, kidneys, and heart,
But atoms, neutrons, and quarks.

The squawks of people passing
Beneath my window, well dressed,
Laughing stupid, yelling mad,
Melodramatically sad –

That young mother, distressed,
Blowing chewing gum bubbles,
Steps into the public bus whirlwind,
Dragging her little lad – where is his dad?

Televisions and billboards squawk around the world –
The sound and fury of the whirlwind – and all the girls
And boys on the bus plugged into their little sound systems:
Little bubbles of sound destroying ear drums.

If a society presses its fingers into its human bubbles
They pop, one after the other.

Many years ago I walked on the beach,
And I watched the seagulls, squawking;
Fighting, stupid and mad, over scraps of food.
Across the ocean beat the drums of war;
Their import I understood.

To fly like a seagull, soar like the whirlwind,
Burst like a bubble –
We cannot stop the hope that in the morning
Binds everything together,
Nor the despair that in the night
Tears everything apart.

Martin and Hope

“Everything that is done in the world
is done by hope,” said Martin Luther
King, Jr.

Boy, I tell you,
This girl Hope, she is one busy gal.

Matter of fact,
Just the other day,
A fine morning,
I was walking to work.

And there was Hope!
All passed out, poor thing,
On that bench,
In a state of exquisite,
Senses-shattering,
World-saving,
Stinky exhaustion.

Come to find out,
That very night,
Sure as I breathed,
I was walking home.

And Hope was gone!
Sure enough moved on,
Her work is never done.
Poor thing, still pushing
That cart with everything,
And no time to settle down.

I wish she’d
Just one time slow down
To tell her about her friend Martin –
How he praised all around
Before he got shot.

Reading One Night

I read an article,
astounding it was.
It had been a long day;
I was tired.
But the ideas propped
my eyes open –
Wide.
I turned
to tell someone.
But no mind was at my side.
Everyone had gone

shopping

driving, laughing, drinking,
pushing, shoving, stinking,
lusting, eyeing, praying,
fussing, flapping, slaying.

So the article said,
“Hush. You can keep our secret.
We will wait
for next year’s children.”