New Poetry October 2014

Untitled

Words fail,

Only if you let them:
Only if you ignore the Silence
From which they arise
And refuse to give them back to It.

Theosis

My sister and I

Had a theory
About where all
The products
In our neighborhood
Grocery store came from.
Based on available data,
It seemed reasonable to assume
That it was all manufactured
Behind that door at the back
From which it emerged on
Carts to be shelved
By the man in the green apron.
The theory seemed for us
To work for bread,
Canned peas, Squirt,
And Milk Duds.
Though the origin of the
Fresh produce remained
A mystery,
As that could only have originated
In a field somewhere.
It took a TV show
About food processing
To enlighten me
About my ignorance.
As it turned out,
That was only
The beginning.

 

Take Heart

When you finally get it

(Even though
They’ve been telling you
All along):
That by waiting
For enlightement
To happen
You missed the point,
It will seem funny
Rather than tragic.

 

Sympathy for the Devil

He lures us back toward non-existence--

As St. Athanasius said it--
But we give him such assistance
That he scarce deserves the credit.

 

My Maternal Grandparents

He was tall and dark and dapper,

She, a California flapper.
He was slow, and she was fast.
No surprise it didn’t last.
Even so, sometimes at night,
I heard, they'd waltz by candlelight.

 

My Grandfather

On a dewy Ozark morn,

Of 1900 he was born
Naïve, upon his little bed,
Of all the woes that lay ahead.
That a poem for him was writ
Would make him blush a little bit.

My Grandmother

She drank her coffee from the saucer,

Lots of milk to supplement.
She didn’t know from Keats or Chaucer,
But whistled everywhere she went.