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.

Greenwood

Greenwood
Was a cemetery for the colored,
A place where the pale-colored bones
Of black folk
Would not through ages rot
Near the pale-colored bones
Of white folk.

And the spirits of the dead
Linger and lament:
Wealth begets more wealth.
Want begets more want.

These days Greenwood
Is a haunt:
Weeds and ivy choke
The graves among the oak.

And the spirits of the dead
Linger and lament:
Wealth begets more wealth.
Want begets more want.

The white man’s marker taunts,
From its shining grave upon a hill,
That declaration of segregation
That was Greenwood,
Now fallen mute and still.

And the spirits of the dead
Linger and lament:
Wealth begets more wealth.
Want begets more want.

Why care for the plots of the dead
When we can scarcely tend the living?

To right the ancient wrongs
Among the living poor today
Would not undo the lynching.
In the well-kept tombs
Of the martyred dead
Is the silence of forgiving.

August Moon

Another summer slipped away
In a warm and windy haze.
Another summer I don't sense
Your silent, steady gaze
As I fussed about the kitchen
To pour us both a glass of wine.

Another summer fades in time,
Images lodged in the mind
That blur misty when I find
One night melts into another,
One year into another.

On a warm and balmy night
Under a waning August moon
We said we'd see each other soon.

Side by side we slowly walked,
In quiet whispers we had talked
Of all the things still left to see,
To hear, to taste,
Before time laid this world to waste.

Perhaps we knew and would not say
Our roads would lead us separate ways.
To keep your fading memory bright,
I look up at the August moon -
Like you, her smile is filled with light.

Hope and Remembrance

The child was born on Memorial Day.
Her parents christened her Hope.
Soon the young father, so full of pride,
Shipped off to war and died.

And so the saddened young bride
Was left with Hope by her side
To get on in the Land of the Free.

And oh what a sight to see!
With each passing birthday -
A time of imagined glee -
The mother told Hope sad stories
Of all those soldiers, dead in glory,
To be counted on Memorial Day. 

The child never knew a birthday cake
Without a mournful soldier's story
That would make her cry and shake.

To mark the holiday in school one day
Hope asked her teacher for some paper -
She wished to draw a simple mark
For every soldier who had died
In every war on either side -
The teacher laughed, "Oh silly lark!
Your paper would be miles too long!"
And so Hope's project was denied.

No one can say the hour or day
When Hope passed into song.
For the pain of remembrance,
And the senseless guilt,
Is remarkable in its resemblance
To the Tower of Hope we built.

Deep within that quiet Tower,
With every soldier's death
In every passing hour,
We hide far from the question -
Why them and not me?

And so one fine Memorial Day
No one could hear Hope scream,
"To live with death what will it take?"
And then as if in a fantastic dream
Hope baked herself a birthday cake
And in the hundred candles' gleam
She set herself on fire.

Yes, the consequence is dire -
The one who feels all pain's a liar -
To truly mourn all soldiers dead
Would take up all the days
And burn out life's desire.
Better that we should designate
To remember all, for reason's sake,
One simple holiday.

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.

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.

Moon Clouds

Summer moon,

Your face blurred behind clouds

That move with a soft white glow,

Your quiet splendor lost

On the faces below.  

Embroiled in the heat of revelry,

The abandon of night,

The exhaustion of forgetting

What could have been,

What might -  

Souls turn to one another

With eyes that barely speak,

Worn by intoxication

Of sound, and light, and drink.  

The mind can barely think.

The nose has lost its sense.

But the mouth moves

In the hopeful present tense: 

You are beautiful, the most beautiful.  

Let us love tonight 

And escape the sight  

Of our memories.  

Summer moon,

Time is late to feel regret.

Don’t look upon my yearning.

Better yet that you should set

And make my shadow die.

 

Wanderer

Behind a solitary man
Lies a tragedy
Concealed in the grimace of a smile,
In the polite nod, all the while
The eyes look elsewhere.

On the other side of his silence

Lay, tucked and forgotten,
Tales – a day or year – of violence.
Eyes look across the distance
Of wide open spaces
To the kindness and graces
Of people long gone.

Now he walks down that road,

Unseen in a crowd,
Where each one bears a load,
Where each one holds a story –
Quite mundane, without glory –  
Like the trinket he will carry
From the one he said he’d marry.

August 6, 1945

Sixty-seven years is a long time to forget

The faraway victims that we never met,

And the color of their final sunset.

The children born today can never remember;

For years and years, throughout the world,

In towns and fields, no uttered word

Of that war or surrender.

Who alive today can truly say

What horror took place on that day

When the bomb found Hiroshima in its path,

Its heat burning life away

Like a vengeful sun god’s wrath?

And so we turn to dusty books

Where the pictures live in print.

But of the toll that Little Boy took,

The stories there only hint.

Sixty-seven years is a long time to grow,

As the trees, the flowers, and the grass show,

While the Ota River through the town flows

And new festivals shine in the lantern glow.

Throughout the years we failed to hear

The distant Hiroshima echo -

In the victims’ cries under smoke-filled skies

And the beastly bombs’ loud bellow:

Warsaw, Helsinki,

London, Coventry and Belfast;

Hamburg, Cologne,

Essen, Bremen, and Dresden;

Leningrad, Stalingrad,

Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade;

North Korea, Vietnam,
Beirut, Baghdad, Basra.

Until the day that mankind brings

And end to the making of bombs,

Our children will in remembrance sing
Hiroshima’s deathly songs.

Birthday Cake

Melancholy is an ailment,
As common as the cough.
Though we take our medicine,
It remains, tough,
Rooted in our deepest days.

I always wanted a simple cake,
With blue lettering and white frosting.
But for years
My parents bought a fruitcake
For my birthday.

I always wanted the white cake;
All the other children got white cake.
How I cursed my lot,
Fated as it was for fruitcake.

But I failed to see the fruitcake
For what it was -
For the color of my parents' minds,
For the memories, hard to find,
After the cakes, and everyone else,
Are gone.

Now in the days of no cake
I see what is at stake.
To water the tree of my days
Is the best medicine to take,
And to hope, from beneath its shady leaves,
To take, from the burden of years, a brief reprieve.

Independence: A Meditation

We gained our independence from the faraway king,
Only to grow dependent on this new land of dark forests
And mysterious savages.

We gained independence from the wild frontier,
And the fetters of an early death,
Only to grow dependent on television, automobiles, airplanes,
Computers, and other machines of convenience.

We gained independence from God,
Only to grow dependent upon The Next Big Truth.

The myths we celebrate are not our fate;
Independence is merely a date on a calendar,
A folk tale wandered far
From the stare of our impassive future.

America, like Janus, has two faces:
Independence looks to the past;
Dependence looks to the future.

Empires have come and empires have gone.
And after the deeds of history are done
Only the ruins remain and the myths are remembered.

We have too many emails to write,
Too many cupcakes to bite,
Too many flavors to try,
Too many handbags to buy,
Too many bills left to pay,
Or rushed appointments to stay,
Too many miles left to travel,
Or business deals will unravel.

Too many machines of convenience
To remember the birthdays.

Happy Birthday, America!
And as we celebrate your myths,
Perhaps new gods will be born, and walk the land,
Out of the mists, from sea to shining sea,
A new version of the Trinity,
Of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
Of Independence, Dependence,
And Interdependence.

And, America, the boon I wish for you the most:
The vision to see as clear as the moon;
Into the mirror of the Next Big Truth -
That you have become the faraway king,
That we are all gone much too soon,
And that kindness is the thing,
Through which empires must pass
For their greatness to last.

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.

Radio Days

My father’s
Widow’s father
Died in the night,
His last days spent
Listening without sight
To his radio, head bent

Towards the announcer, who
In the little radio
Sounded the friend to his ears,
The old neighbor of the years,
Since blindness forced
The long, slow goodbye
To the man in the picture box.

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

And what did the radio say?
Baseball -
It was always baseball:
War, famine,
The weather,
Friends, birthdays,
And the departed wife -
Life long ago lost its time slot
To baseball and the long shots
Hit over the fence -

Fence the neighbor leaned over
On long ago tropical mornings
And asked for the news
In perfect regional Spanish:

Do you know who vanished?
And what of the Revolution?
Will you flee to America?

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

Now, in his little chair,
In the little room with the curtains drawn,
Came the news of American baseball,
Fresh as the air at dawn,
And fifty-year-old Cuban baseball.
The years came from nowhere
Through the radio:

Those were radio days,
When the sun shone warmly,
Pleasantly, on supple skin,
Wearing shirt clean enough to work in,
And trousers fashionably rolled.

When the nights grew long and cold,
In between heartache and strife,
At the kitchen said his wife:
You grow old, you grow old,
You shall wear the bottom of your trousers rolled.
Therefore, mend them; let me mend them.

Still, the radio brought no news
Of the fences left to mend,
Of the wars the years would send,
Of the years that time would spend
To bring a body round the bend
Into the last inning.

One night,
With the heavens above spinning,
Came the announcer’s voice, grinning:
Good night to all, and to all a good night.
But before then, though without sight,
Let us hear the beginning,
Of that time in the inning
When the ball was sent spinning
Out past fences that never need mending,
Where we can write our own ending
And our games are played in the light.

Summer

The dragonfly
Grasps the meaning -
To sample the meadow,
Flitting here and there,
Among the tall grass

While the sun shines brightly
And the clouds roll by
Across a summer sky
That forever will be -
But not for you and not for me.

Do you remember when as kings
Of our backyards we traced
Our trajectory?
You’d be an astronaut,
Or a pirate.
I’d be a lawyer,
Or the President.

No one can know the trajectory
Of the dragonfly in the meadow,
Where once we sat
With our beer and wine.

Now, it is true that sorrow
Fades in the wind of time.
But that summer meadow
Is never as bright
Since the only eyes to see
Are mine.

Dawn

In the pre-dawn light
I approach the window
And behold the sight
Of the empty sidewalks.

In that quiet hour
I imagine your returning,
Filled with a silent power,
Up the sidewalks.

You are always returning,
When the world is asleep –
Cracked, worn, and persevering,
Like the sidewalks.

But dead men don’t walk
Except in dreams.
And still it seems
The sidewalks expect you,
Cracked, worn, and persevering –
Returning from the long journey
With stories, strength, and learning.

The sidewalks do not reach you.
The dawn deceives.
For a while yet I shall expect you
Before your memory leaves.

Music

The blending
Of the body
And sound
And thought
And feeling
And memory

That took place
Before
Either of us knew
That we would not hear each other,
That we would not see each other,
Again.

Castle

Impregnable
Wall of rock
Sheer and steep
Above a moat
Of waters still and deep;

Imposing,
The yawning keep,
That beckons from
The drawbridge
At my feet.

Narrow the way
Through the iron gate:
Beyond those walls
Their world awaits.

Nobles, ladies,
In finery played
Their flutes and dulcimers
Round the table well laid:

Goblets of wine
And meats with cheeses,
Candles that swayed
In the evening breezes.

Blown has the wind of centuries,
Gone now the tapestries, luxuries,
Silent the courtyards and hallways,
Where troubadours once sang their lays.

Dance a while yet, I say.
Safe within the mind’s walls,
Lords, ladies and thralls,
As phantoms you may stay.

Palestinian Boy

Today
yesterday
Lama was not in class
Because her house fell down on her.
That is what Reda said
Last week
yesterday before yesterday.
But Mother says
Tonight
now
That Lama moved far away,
Maybe to Bethlehem.
I don’t know,
Maybe to Israel.
That is where the Devil lives.
So says Reda
Sometimes.

In Your Memory

Who are you
To believe
That I will go on forever?

You make me
Into God
When you leave me in the ether.

Suspending my existence
You forget me –
A quantum space that no one watches.

There I reside,
Gods and demons alongside
The stillborn visions of our future.

And so I - nonexistent - wait
For that day when
You escape your selfabsorbing kingdom.

You will think of me and
From the Timeless I will spring,
The angels flying to their frescoes.

Briefly while I live,
Narrow the window of Time,
Yet will I live and die
Before you again forget me.

Valentine's Day

I think of that time
You took me out to dinner.
But tonight,
The pavement, slick with rain,
Shines brighter than my shoes.

I don’t remember
How bright that night was.
But tonight,
The moon behind a cloud,
Just streetlights at my door.

I don’t hear you
Discuss your workday anymore.
But tonight,
Noises by my window,
Formless faces passing by:
Talking, laughing.

Faceless and numberless:
In all those years since dinner time –
The millions who have died of famine,
And war,
And earthquakes,
And too much rain . . .

Yes, there is pain, still,
A hunger streetlights cannot see.
But that matters less
With each war, with each monsoon.

With no moon at my window
You cannot see while I prepare
This microwave meal.