Kentucky Derby

Let us be thankful to the gods
For the bacchanalia,
For the fruits and for the wine.
So went the refrain in ancient times.

But the Lord was present in those days,
In the faces of fledgling Christians
Thrown naked into the arenas
Holding starving lions.

From those anguished faces
Wringing shackled hands
The Lord’s message rang out:
Repent! For the end is near!

But who would want to hear?
The thought of ending the party!
Really! Bring on the thrills!

The transmogrification of the Lord continued:
As a bull in a Spanish arena,
Pricked by a starving bullfighter;
As a horse in the Kentucky Derby,
Goaded by a starving jockey;
As a football player in the Super Bowl,
Cheered by a starving public.

In the lands of endless bounty,
From Rome to present day,
The rich starve in every country,
While the poor are toys for play.
All are racing to the finish,
For what prize no one can say.
In the crowd’s roar after victory,
The horse’s groans are swept away.

Location

Silly black man!
Did you think
That you could smoke that blunt,
Bluntly blowing your pain away,
On a corner of that stricken,
Despair-ridden ghetto?

Hell, no!
Calamitous location
Is your situation.

Look here, black man.
Take your smoking on down
To the university town.
Will that professor's frown
Force the smokers
(Young and white) to lay low?

Hell, no!
Your situation
Is a pox on your location.

Listen here, black man.
That smoking is just fine
In places where the sun don't shine.
Deep inside the gated homes
(Old and white) smoke roams
From room to room;
And no police anytime soon.

Our location is Us.
Your location is Them.
Look for those white gates
And watch the rates
Of arrest disappear -
But never the fear
Of them;
No, never the fear
Of them.

Winter Hill

The winter, with its white,
Blinds our sight:
Everything is sleeping, not dead.

What is not sleeping lies quite still,
Or barely moves:
Our heavy coats keep out the chill
But we move more slowly,
As our boots trudge up
The snow covered hill.

There on that silent summit –
If you are brave, if you are patient –
You can see with winter eyes
And you can hear with winter ears.

The red holly berry,
Amid brown bushes and gray earth,
Leaps brightly like a star in dark night.
A clump of snow, softly, quietly,
Slides from a branch to the ground, all white.

A crow, high above, cries out in the stillness,
But it does not speak to you,
The crow, like the deer and the mice,
Has its own business.

And all around the strangely silent hill,
The city stretches, just as strangely still.
It is the power of winter to hear the sound of nothing
That muffles the shopping, the driving,
The fussing and the striving.

The towering trees, with their bare branches,
Reveal a sky that lays hidden in summer.
The trees do not speak to you, but they let you listen,
As their hands, covered in ice that glistens,
Beseech the great sky above.

Stars that hang like a thousand points of ice
Receive that silent winter prayer of love.
The prayer includes you but is not to you.
Having witnessed, you will return home
Where you will join the world in sleeping.

Cold Hands

On this long winter’s night,
The cold instills fright
On all small creatures hid from sight;

The barren earth,
And the cobblestones on the earth,
As hard and cold as granite.

The trunks of trees pale gray, wearing masks of death,
Hold up naked branches, supplicant fingers, outstretched,
Against a sky that says nothing, beyond grasp, beyond breath.

And the cold descends upon everything,
Reaching up, gripping legs like fingers of the dead,
The unremembered, beyond comfort, beyond breath.

As I hurry on, icy breath lost to the sky,
My gloved fingers clutch the chest, press my coat tight.
The other huddled passersby, silent, scurry on,
Minds shut against the indifference of the night.

All are intent on the hearths and fires
In solid homes where the circles of light
Caress their faces, their tired smiles.
But they don’t think; no one thinks,
Their minds shrink from sight.

Outside the icy sky, expectant, stares down upon me, pressing,
Cold probing, trying to find that place in the mind,
Where thoughts lay breathing,
Brave though quiet, dreaming:

All the small creatures lie in their holes, dark and warm.
But what of the women and men without home or fire?
Where do they go? Where do they hide in a world so dire?
My God, what if it’s me with no home in the world?
What if it’s me that the world forgets?
Who will I see with an outstretched hand?

Alone I stand and stare at the night.
The cruelty of winter makes no noise, hid from sight.
And though the warm fire of my home still awaits me,
Long will I feel the cold, hard touch of a world
That one day may forsake me.

Solitary Pine

With no one to befriend me,
With no one to know who I am,
A stranger I shall remain
On the day of my last stand.

So near me they pass –
Lovers who laugh, lovers who quarrel –
Yet my mirth I can only share
With the indifferent little squirrel.

Upon me the people confide
Their fragile human sorrows;
Today regale me with plans and pride,
But abandon me tomorrow.

No one has asked me the questions
One friend would ask another:
To what end do you grow?
How does it feel to be covered in snow?
Whatever became of your brothers?
When this forest is cleared like the others,
Which way will you go?

If my voice the wind through the miles could carry
To the people who live with their picnics and parties,
To them I’d declare all the wisdom of my days
Of a life spent on a cliff, above a windy, rocky bay.

Standing still, time slows its pace,
So I live longer, though we share the same small space.
Reflecting alone, my thoughts and world I own,
So I stand stronger, while others scatter, by the winds blown.
Dreaming alone, though I share not these dreams,
Makes life more joyful than my lonely days would seem.

And yet, like the air above the cliff always beyond grasp,
Lives the tender touch of friends, as they pass around a glass.
You, through your friends, will be remembered beyond your years,
While I, when I am gone, will have the winter rain for tears.

Candelabra

Candelabra burning bright,
Chase the shadows into night.
Shine upon the crowd that gathers
To forget important matters.

Candelabra, if you could see
How the revelers dance with glee,
And consume their little cakes
With exotic kinds of teas.

Candelabra, if you could hear
How the music fills their ears,
As they laugh and cluck and crow;
Their party forms a jolly show.

Candelabra, if you could turn
To the crystal window sights,
You would be suprised to learn
How the others spend their nights.

Candelabra, stoop to see
Dirty children running free
A promised meal they run to follow
Promised by a crooked shadow.

Candelabra, bend to hear
How the mothers sob in fear
Their children gone from feeble sight
To form the armies of the night.

Candelabra, guard your flame,
For throngs are whispering your name.
They gather at the gates of hell,
Your festival in mind to quell.

Candelabra, pray aloud
That God may calm this angry crowd.
Be not surprised if you should see
This night repeat like history.

Down the ages, through the years,
Said the sages amid jeers:
A prince his hoard will fail to keep
When the poor fight hunger in their sleep.

Moonwater

On the paths that you may take,
With no choices left to make,
You can always get water from the moon.
So said a father to his son
On a sunny afternoon
In the childhood day of life.

The years brought strife,
And paths to take,
And choices to make.
But still the skies refrained from rain
On the nights the moon hung bright.

Then the son turned man, one evening as he ran,
Turned a corner in the night
And the path became an alley,
A darkened, rustling end.

The rustling in the darkness
Made a sound, a weighing sadness:
You are alone,
Though still surrounded.
Your life is mean,
By lies all bounded.
You are the prey
By demons hounded.

And though the women come and go in the room,
Sipping softly, talking low,
Beneath the candelabra moon,
You cannot move, you are not seen,
Your life a demon’s passing dream.

There is water on the moon, said the son turned man.
This he repeated, like a prayer, like a talisman in sand.
Down fell the water from the moon
Like the rain of glassy night
That washed the sadness from the land.

Not far from the dead end alley,
Where the lamps had pierced the dark,
Lay a quiet, leafy park.
There a fountain played its music
While the birds slept on the branches,
With the water from the moon
Falling lightly on the benches.

And the son turned man that night
Beheld an extraordinary sight:
Figures on the benches sprang
From the bright moonwater rain.
To him they beckoned,
Sit and talk a while with us,
While in the night the fountain sang.

These are the people of the world:
Reading their papers,
Watching the birds,
Some appear dapper,
And others absurd.

In them all moonwaters run,
So the son turned man had learned.
In them all his father’s love,
Like the shining moon,
Had burned.

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.

Last Letter

I shall not write again.
For you turned out in the end
To be far from any friend
Whose hand he’d fairly lend,
My hurts and slights to mend.

But, instead, like all cruel men,
Who into open hearts they wend
By smiles and words that blend
Messages and acts that send
A naïve soul round the bend

Into the garden of love run foul with briars –
You stood revealed, a hissing liar.

Your kissing desires, surpassing sweet,
In a moment expire, and abandon
My soul to the wind in the street.

No more wasteful ink to spill,
No more grieving heart to bleed;
For any word you seek from me
You shall have the stars to read.

Quantum Dream

Bonds
Are mutually
Reinforcing.

But the opposite holds true.

Distance
And neglect build
An ever yawning chasm.

The games
That children play
Draw them closer.

But the opposite holds true.

Wars force
Nations apart
As the children's bodies pile.

Kiss the mirror
And grow nearer
To the other world
Where things still whirl,
Just the opposite way.

If I had my way,
I would spend my days
In a field at play
With the children,

Playing Molecule Ball
When each child can call
Where the ball will fly
And what it becomes
When it lands with a sigh:

A friend bearing ice cream,
A blue and white kite,
Balloons on a long string,
A dog that won't bite -

The waking world follows
A magical logic that leads to the gallows.
What the world needs
Is the science of dreams
Where the children lead and every man follows.

Labor Day

And what should we say remains
Of the workers in the days of trains?
And what should we say
Of your grandfathers
And your grandmothers
And the world they sought to claim?

Only the murals remain for us to see
Of men in soiled shirts straining to free
A generation from American serfdom
Through telegraph poles, railways,
And onward to freedom.

Down in a lost town, a lonely post office sits,
Its mural of men as giants on tractors and combines;
While the giant women fed the workers in long lines.

Now, those sculpted workers that stared into the future,
Their eyes grave, their jaws set, their brows furrowed,
Look on a present day no one had thought would follow.

For the government halls are empty of the spirit of the common good,
And the death song has long been sung of the union’s brotherhood,
And the silence that was heard before the strike at last was called
Is buried by the laugh of the rich men and their lawmakers in thrall.

What shall we say of Labor Day
That will carry any meaning
To your sons and daughters
Who, one fine day,
Will want to work with faces beaming?

Forgotten workers are lives in vain
Unless we, too, united strain
To ease the modern worker’s sorry plight –
Democracy dies without a fight.

The Stranger

Blind, brutal sex with the stranger –
It pleases the body
But not the soul.

Quietly,
In the darkness of the midnight bed,
The soul cries itself to sleep;
It is the sleep of the little death
That comes with the dream of remembering.

Yet soon enough,
Oh, soon enough,
Comes the hour of forgetting
With the rising of the sun.

Soon enough
It is another clear, mirror day
When nobody sees and nobody stares
At the hole in the soul
Carelessly placed there
By the sighs of the stranger.

Dessert

I was born into a trap,
Not of my making,
From which there is no escape –

Centuries of ancestors
Threw their wiles into the fires,
Their passion, their power,
Their mad ambitions,
And their terrible beauty,

To forge this cunning cage.

There is no point to rage
Against these bars I cannot bend,
This lock I cannot open:
No escape until the end.

How you – and the world – stare
At this prisoner on a stage,
At these sinews under tight, smooth skin,
At these dark eyes that draw you into sin,
At these full lips that

Hide the tongues of fire
Within the steel trap of a smile.

I want to explain the origin of the universe to you;
I want to shout the intelligence of generations –
How is this and that and why not now or then
But perhaps one day somewhere.

And all this to save you from your own traps, and
The millions of traps that walk the cities of this world
With stealthy strides and hide in plain sight and
In the corners of the night.

But these full lips you simply bite
In the last dark hour, as I pour out my power,
Robbing you of sight and hearing;
From me no explanation – just a moan, searing –
Our cold sweat sealing
The doom of the prophets who died in the deserts.

Toward the Sea

The eggs in the sand, lining the shore,
Luminescent orbs, alien in the soft moonlight,
Signal the beginning of life with purpose.

Blindly the newborn beaks press against the shells;
Life emerges in unison, choreographed by the stars,
And faces the sound of the unseen ocean of destiny.

Alone in the universe, each blind turtle struggles;
Escaping the eggshell prison, silently padding ahead,
The silver ocean beckoning, like beacon and siren of souls.

And so all souls heed their essence
And turn towards their unseen seas.

But I am turned around this night, the moonlight shining
On a grove of trees, leaves shimmering in an unseen wind;
And, blindly, I make my way though the branches creak and tease.

The road beyond that greets me is darker than my silver sea;
And though in my blood runs the need of the stars for union with you,
I plunge down the black road, my solace the dance of moonlit shadows.

Citizens United

On that bright summer day,
When you yelled at the Grand Canyon,
Your voice came gliding back
Across the chasm of a million years

Like when

On that balmy Sunday afternoon
Your voice came jumping back
At the children's zoo
When Marley the Parrot said,
Hello, stupid!
Pleased to meet you.
I like butter on my bread!

The ghosts of our childhood past
Cannot be heard over the constant din
Of the cash registers in the Modern World,
Nor seen over the constant grin
Of the shopkeepers
As they laugh and whirl.

The money you spend on the things you buy
Comes back to you -
Not by gliding, not by jumping -
But, softly, by turns slow and sly.

Pans and pots,
Cars and stocks,
Eggs and fish,
And a serving dish,
Belts and phones,
And rugs for homes,
Wine and blouses,
Leather purses,
Magazines
And gasoline,
TV sets and radios,
Chicken and tomatoes,
Toilet paper,
Office paper,
Soap and salt,
And modern art,
Shiny shoes,
And your club dues,
Dolls, shampoo,
And toothpaste, too -
All come slowly back to you

Like when

Your brothers lose their modest jobs;
The plant shutters, headed overseas;

Your friends lose their modest houses
And the banks decline their quiet pleas;

Your son can't see the doctor
Until the premium is received;

And your father sadly counts
More cars on roads than there are trees.

The voice that cried across the hills
And made fun of little parrots
For a simple childhood thrill
Is now fallen mute and still.

Money is the modern voice.
So decree your childhood ghosts:
Those without it make no noise,
And those that have it laugh the most.

The Banality of Letters

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Hey man
Hows it goin :-)

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Fine, man.
How’s it going with you?

Tap, tap, tap . . .

OK man
Just chillin ;-)

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Just chillin’? Cool.
And how’s that? The chillin’.

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Jus kickn back
Here with some buds :-p

Tap, tap, tap . . .

OK, cool. Man.

Tap, tap, tap . . .

So whats up with you ;-)

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Oh, you know. Not much.
And you?

Tap, tap, tap . . .

Not much too. Laid back
Looking for good times :-p
You man

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap . . .

I’m cool, man, real cool –
But not dead.
A few seething thoughts, though,
In my head
Make me hot.

What have we got?
With all our keyboards, screens,
Endless machines,

Living on eighty dollars a day

While billions of other faceless souls
Live on less than a dollar a day –

It looks like you forgot,
Though I remember,
A sentence ends with a dot.

But your words resemble
A TV jingle, not a sentence,
Letters strung along in space
Whose only hollow pretense
Is to pass for human warmth.

Hot is the sun whose indifferent warmth
Bakes the backs of the faceless who toil
In a faraway country for a dollar a day
Burying computers and screens in their soil –
The grave where machines and meaning decay.

Sponge

Self-absorption
Is a quality of children.

Adults mostly lose it
As they grow older
And learn to see
The world around them on fire.

Burning, burning everywhere –
The earth, the trees, the buildings,
The edifices that hold up our society.

Burning high –
The heavens and faith and good works.

The child thinks only of her doll
While around her the curtains burn
And the wax on the doll face melts
As the father in shirtsleeves, huffing,
Snatches his little girl
And charges through the window.

Absorption
Is also a quality of sponges.

There are only napkins at the table,
And I use one, a red napkin, to wipe
Your spilled coffee
As you rummage in your briefcase,
For your phone, your calendar,
And God Knows What Else,

While my words melt in the howl of flames.

The waiter returned with a sponge,
As I looked out the window – people, cars, buses combusting –
The sponge – pink – absorbed the coffee, vanished in the howl of customers.
I wanted to take that sponge and hold it to my face, to wipe the wax.
But that would have been childish.

The Lovers

On a hillside,
In a certain place in the world,
Lay two large stones,
Whose love for each other
Through the ages unfurled.

In the first days,
The stones felt each others' presence.
Saying nothing,
They heard the wind blow round
Their contours and their essence.

The rains of spring,
The tears of laughter for their tales,
Followed snow storms
And long nights in snow drifts
When understanding failed.

The summer sun
Made the hillside flowers pretty.
But heated rays
Beating their skin had made
Fast friends in adversity.

To the old stones
A traveler never came by.
But through the years
The birds flew by with news
Of a land with perfect skies:

Beyond the hillside lay
Country where the break of day
Brought warm showers,
Deathless flowers,
A sun that did not sting,
No wind to erode skin.

Then one stone said to the other
On a cloudy autumn day:

I wish to go away
And see those other places,
The lines on other faces,
And hear what strange birds say.

Said the second stone to the other
In the quiet tone of the lover:

Beyond this hillside lies another.
And beyond that other hills lie still.
The slopes resemble one another
And there winds, too, blow ill.

If you must go then you must know
That I'll cry tears of rain.
Only the grass and wind will know
My sadness and my pain.

But know as well that after time
Your seat the grass will cover.
And I will look within myself
To find my longtime lover.

For you are stone and I am stone
Our spirits are both clay.
I'll mold your image in my soul
Though you roam to the last day.

Independence Day

When the end came
It was a fiery ball of rock
Screaming from the heavens -
Total and sudden annihilation.

It was the Fourth of July,
Two hundred and fifty million years ago,
When the dinosaurs were laid to rest
As the bedrock of our nation.

The beasts in the field would never ask why.
Indeed, the dinosaurs that looked at the sky,
Unaware that they were beasts,
Unaware that they would die,
Could scarcely pull themselves away
From their lives of mastication.

The mighty brontosaurus,
Thirty-five tons of hunger,
Flatulence and defecation,
With empty, misty eyes,
Was hurled, dismembered,
Miles into the skies.

Though no one would remember,
The brontosaurus - bones, entrails, and cranium -
Would become for generations
A source of quick petroleum.

Oil powered the grill
That cooked the senseless pigs,
And every parade powered
By the oil from countless rigs.

The factories that made the flags
That waved in scores of stadiums
Were powered by oil, blood-like leached,
From brontosaurus cranium.

At last the cars, their gas tanks full,
Filled the parking lots of churches
In the baking July sun.
Parishioners, their stomachs full,
Ate the body and drank the blood
Of the Holy Son and sang a song:

God Bless America
This Independence Day.
Our Land is rich;
Our Land is bright.
The power of our Nation
Is of God’s clear, endless might.

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.

Hair

Because hair grows,
An entire population of villagers
Comes and goes though nobody knows;
They work in the city salons,
Washing our hair on and on.

Because hair turns white,
An entire population of chemicals
Mixes and flows in colorful shows
After large funds are expended
Though God never intended.

Because hair falls out,
An entire population of rabbits
Shrinks and grows and suffers the blows
Of experiments in stages
In a thousand metal cages.

What befell the rabbits taken from their fields;
What befell the chemicals in their toxic yields;
What befell the villagers in the salons they built
No one could predict, though we all got the bill.

For as sure as hair grows,
We are prisoners of our nature
In a world where our stature
Turns on hair styles and clothes.

I Don't Know

Is the science of the world
Compatible with
Our human experience?
I don't know.

Is the mind
Different from
The brain?
I don't know.

Is there
A thing called
Objective truth?
I don't know.

Is there an ultimate
Reality, and can we
Know it?
I don't know.

How many angels
Can dance
On a dying red rose?
I don't know.

Can you count
Your lovers
On you fingers and toes?
I don't know.

Can you tell me
A secret
That nobody knows?
I don't know.

Do you know
What becomes
Of a child as he grows?
I don't know.

Do your answers
Depend on where
The wind blows?
I don't know.

Who knows?

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.

Missing

On that warm morning
No one noticed much.
But by the hot noontime,
Someone noticed:

The library was not there.
It had been moved.

By mid afternoon
It was discovered
That the park was gone.

The museum was missing,
And the meeting hall,
And the stadium.

Only the school remained.
But it was closed for renovation;
Its roof collapsed.

By sunset the townspeople
Had shuttered themselves
In their living rooms;
The week-long premier
Of reality shows was here.

By evening the blindness
Spread through the town.
Eyes would not meet each other
As heads hung, absently, down.

At night: the howls of dogs,
Louder than the squeals
Of children.

Overhead, the stars wheeled -
The only places left
For thieves to steal.

The Fortune Teller

I'm sorry.
I don't believe
That what you do is true.

That is what
I told the Fortune Teller
On a warm city night
As she stood upon the corner
In the shadow of the lights.

But it is true - a truth
As strange as it is old;
You will believe
If you are told.

Listen. She said:

You are the Unbeliever,
Destroyer of Worlds.
With your Mind of Doubt,
Dragons you will slay,
Old ghosts rout out.

With doubt clear as day,
Charlatans you'll banish.
Priests here will not stay
And mysteries will vanish.

But beware the magic of negation.
In the fusty superstition
Lies the bedrock of our nation.

Though you lead the modern man,
An army of numbers and scales,
You will find that all your plans
Lack the passion of mythic tales.

So do not presume to find me
Alone in the street forlorn,
For my heart mirrors the stars -
The harbor of love
Before Mind was born.

Mother’s Day

No man
Who understands
His precarious existence
Can fail to be
A feminist.

All roads lead from the womb.

Women who wage war:
What have they to prove?
They, like men,
End their days in a tomb.

Rare is the mother
Who raises her little boy
To kill another,
To be the Great King and Destroyer.

The battles of the playground
Are quelled by the mothers
Who teach their children
To kiss one another.

There is enough sand
For two plastic buckets,
And two plastic shovels.

Praise the mothers, then,
Who keep the sand
From being the graves of the soldiers.

Order

Our sidewalk had been spared
By the fickle gods of city maintenance.
Across the street were ditches, and blasted earth,
Where unknown men sweat the cool morning,
For whom dollars were new, mysterious things,
Like childbirth or the endless patience of their women.

Today there were four or five,
Tomorrow perhaps two or three –
With no one present to see
The unmarked vehicles take them away,
Every day, for lack of permits to live;
No one who toils may stay.

From the depths of those ditches no one can hear
The lamentations of the women, their cries so clear;
Still they, too, disappear,
Their children steered
Into lives that veered in all random directions,
Like the frantic ants that flee the pounce of the spider
In some well-tended garden blessed by the fickle gods
Of city ordinances.

At my window a tiny spider has woven its delicate web,
Wet with the morning, the cool air tugging gently
At the random strands that radiate in all directions.
The spider, coiled, awaits:
Ants, children, men, lifetimes, gardens, cities, gods.

Even as I walk along my spared sidewalk,
I hear echoing the sound of shovels
Across every mansion, garden, hovel.
The ditches are dug across our strand of days:
Like brown men and spiders, none of us, though we toil,
May stay.

On Speaking

A tiger
Can talk to a tiger.
A bear
Can talk to a bear.
But a bear can't talk to a tiger.
Tigers won't sit still for bears.

Descartes Dreams

I have learned
In my 400 years
The truth of what many do fear –
That we all breathe alone.

Reality is undeniably
Individual.

For no one can dream your dreams.
No one can feel your fear,
Or your wounded heart,
Or see through your eyes
The light in the skies
On your last fine day.

And yet I have seen
In my 400 years
A truth proud men won’t hear –
That we cannot live alone.

Human life is, quite reliably,
Tribal.

For a child needs his parents in stages.
Industry fails without wages.
And empires come and go
Only through armies of men
That kings may need though never know.

Now, I look on in sadness
At a history spawned by a madness
That ever I dared to conceive:
I think therefore I am,
Failing in truth to perceive
That the mind needs the help
Of the hand
Of the tender mother.

She showed me the simplest truth:
That we all, every day, need each other.

Nature’s Bounty

Snow
Reminds me of death.
It blankets everything –
Removes all color
With its pallor –
Dampens all sound
With indifferent silence.

Whether we war
For gold or oil,
Like ants over tin foil –
Whether we rest or toil –
Still snow descends
On all ants and men.

In the same vein,
The silent mountain stands,
Even if we blast its slope
To cut a vein for coal to flow.
Its indifference seems to show
We could be ants instead of Man.

The ocean in storm –
Its cacophony of sound
Drowns all cries
Before they’re born.

The rushing brush fire –
It incinerates the hillside,
Nests, mansions to ashes
That fall and scatter wide.

This is Nature’s bounty –
That from its implacable way
Men from every country
Might see their will to sway
The world from turning
At last fall away.

For the World alone shall stand
At Night’s end:
To that power we too, like ants,
Shall bend.

The Death of Philosophy

If I say that my beliefs
Are a product
Of my country,
Of my epoch,

Then am I
Caught in that sly
Trap of History
With no words to deny –

For the Cage that falls
Is the Cage of Language.

My belief in relativity
Is relative to itself.
Devoid, perhaps, of authenticity,
It begins to gnaw upon itself.

The Invisible Man
Imagines the color of his eyes.
But the mirror shows nothing;
Nothing until he dies.

Who am I when I sleep?
Who am I when I dream?
Beliefs are fish that leap
In a transparent mental stream.

Happily I fish,
In my country, in my time.
For the world, by turns, shall fade
Through my ignorance sublime.

Children

The birds,
so colorful,
so unselfconscious,
in their gilded cage
with the leaves,
and the seeds,
and the water,
and their little swings.

But then you approach
and it's as if Teacher
has returned to the classroom:
no more twittering, or rummaging;
all stand at attention,
eyeing you this way and that.

What do they see in you?
A vast and towering force,
with a voice like a song of thunder -
Destroyer of Worlds;
you who with your love level the hills
with your gilded cities of ingenuity.

It is the Hand of God
that replenishes their water dish
and their seed dish.

And when you leave,
the little birds resume
their antics, lilting, pecking,
and so they do not see
that the gods, too, fuss and play
in their gilded cage.

‘Tis the Season

You have not been raped,
Or beaten, or maimed,
Or treated like an animal
With no right to think.

Blink. And you’ll see.
You have jewels, and cash,
Food to toss like trash,
And someone in the world
Who remembers your name.

Shame! That joy comes round
Once a year
To the injured faceless loathe to hear,
“We give; we give, in Jesus’
Name.”

Still, the faceless have no name
That you will remember,
Save, perhaps, in December,
That season of the year
When the poor do hope
Their name to hear.

Mourning in America

Legal rights
Are easily won
At the point of a gun.

But it takes patience
And determination
To win rights
Through agitation.

In some tenuous space
In the public square,
Face to face,
The human in you
Meets the human in me.

When faced with the thugs,
Atlas shrugged
And ran.
So here we stand:
The human in you and the human in me,
Holding up the world for all to see –
We can talk through, not around,
Our existence, with persistence.

Like roses, rights abound.
Pick them, share them.
Listen to the sound
Of the discourse in the public square.

But, oh, how you stare!
No, indeed, that is not our public square,
Where words like bullets wound all who care
To share the shoulder burden of citizenship,

Of the human in you
And the human in me.

Thanksgiving 1994

Clattering of spoons,
While silver children’s voices
Round the table run.