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Safeguards of Spring
The lake is down –
To the frozen edges
A swan or two
And tasteless
Geese footing
To rocky nests
Where they curl into
Feathery boulders among
The cold pebbles
Upon which you’ll slip
Next summer
Try to find music in
Canadian geese honking
All night – by morning
You’ll know all about
Exercising in futility
They remain in spite of disdain
Small fluffy armadas floating in
February 28th’s icy water
Honking in a frosty daybreak
And, just when you’re ready
To curse the freezing dun
Madness of the season
An arcing muster of mallards
Waving in decisive consideration
Of parting clouds
Lands, arching necks
Off which the sun glints its elegant
Emerald promise of spring
The Exultation is in the Knowing
The hardest thing about writing
Used to be rejection but now
It is the crazy aftermath
Of question marks that appear
After I’ve left all my
Answers on the page
It becomes not a matter of quality
Or quantity but a matter of why;
Why does outside acceptance matter?
Part of me sees the old metaphysical ploy
I’ll get it once I don’t want it.
Can I walk into that room and
Switch off the light of desire?
Is writing simply a vehicle
In which to drive my persona
Stopping occasionally to mop
My sweat-filled brow and rest
My silly soul dedicated to
The business of ego?
Is that it?
PEACE: WHAT IF…
What if Peace was publicly traded
In every heart and highly rated
At the center on a trading floor
Waved slips for goodwill, ceasefires and more
What if Peace invested care
Opened hearts with earnings per share
What if Peace paid interest high
In harmonious treaties to ratify
Peace will need to be monetized
IPOs will be highly prized
Peace could trade in open exchange
Swords for ploughshares to be arranged
Peace stock values will rise with belief
No house of cards, dishonesty ceased
No slim margin in which to trade
All activity above moral grade
But…
Peace is too polite to nail and rend
Old Wall Street brokers for their dividends
MEMORY: A Necessary Struggle
Yesterday my husband put the app *Shazam on my cell phone
(*A method of identifying music simply by holding the phone
Up to a speaker to catch the song’s lyrics)
I left the room defeated and purposeless
Something else for which my brain does not have to work
There are days taken up in battle with forgetfulness
Days that end in celebration of memory’s grace
Now, what will I do
To replace that struggle
With a memory reticent
Holding on to those
Blessings only
To let go
In the upwelling of silence
In rooms wallpapered with lyrics that sing
The long fable of my youth
THE FERRY TO THE DRY TORTUGAS
Seats (the best) on the top deck
Draped with posh hotel
Towels – pulling double duty saving and drying the seat for
The entitled; the family of five with a guest
Middle age couple #1 she holding desperately his hand
He looking like he stole time
Deciding on the white island linen shirt
The #2 she, face a beautiful forlorn ruin looking
Into the shoulder she married.
A shoulder that is turned away from her
As her husband talks across his son’s girlfriend (who feigns sleep)
Explaining something
Important (?) to his namesake
The young pale and married couple next to us Russian (?)
He sits away from the rays reading a thick paperback
She sits yoga in the sun
Two lovers at the rail; beautiful
Unnoticing of the lame (who are now walking)
And the blind (who are now seeing)
When he of receding hairline & confidence
grabs at her hips
She shimmy’s away
Ignorant of the finite attracting powers of good skin
She stands away a bit – the coy mistress, eyeing him
As the lusty gulf wind whips at her hem
Revealing everyone’s wish
THE MUSEUM OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING
Where we keep our humanity
Hermetically sealed
And in the future they will come
Down long google-glassed tunnels
To collect artifacts
Heartless facts from
Our artless landmarks
Blind to the act:
Giving succor to the enemy
Night on the battlefield when mountains
Of hatred became mere
Mounds over which we stumbled with gifts
The weight of humanity too great
Too heavy for the light of day
A light used to make way for
The resumption of war
YEAR’S END
On my daily walks I am beyond
The inexorable reach of headlines
Months ago I left Facebook and
Made a cheap vow to ignore the gridlock
In our sorrowful culture
But the screams and charges sneak through
Like the guilt of a favorite character
Who comes face to face with her own complicity;
When grief came – seeping in
Around the edges of her being –
The openings she is unable to conceal
Today, in my rented depression,
Grief dressed for battle and screaming
Hatred and death in the streets
Overshadows that
Overworked and overlooked
Emotion — love.
Loving one another should be so easy, right?
Wrong.
Our hearts remain an
Unprofitable wilderness;
Barren, drought-stricken stretches
Of leather bent on
Destroying that which we
Cannot control
We all are simply the people we’d like to think we are –
We measure our goodness by what we
Don’t do
Like
Where we don’t
Go
Who we don’t
Include
And we fight inscrutable, defensive battles
All in service to the ego
Making us
Mechanical
Flavorless people
Unable to acknowledge
The alchemy of delusion
GO THERE!
We live so long – hopefully long enough
To know life is enough
All we should want
The rest is fearing
The opinions of others
We are old enough to resist
The urge
Know there is great pleasure in GO!
It is not the There
But the trip
The memories will come years later (if at all)
With its uneven ruler
To defend life’s
Crooked calculus
EVERY TEACHER PRAYS
Every teacher prays
The Catholic, Protestant, non-Christian, Atheist …
Everyday, walking the classroom’s threshold
We pray to be delivered from
The menace of caprice
In a land governed by misery
The only evidence of our existence
With nothing but a chalk
backbone for the onslaught
The gunfight
The fire
The explosion
The educational cataclysm
That will leave the classroom
Scattered in doom
Books, bodies and minds with
Words and dreams
Obliterated beyond recognition
…pray for us teachers now
and at the hour of our test,
Ah women
Gwen's World 