A nation breathes a sigh relieved
By the comfort of the tolling knells,
As a month of “Guiltys” ring the alarm
Across the land alerting all
You can’t outpace the steps of Justice.
But in the distance a black man tries
To out-run a speeding bullet!
Category: Poems
-
Jogging in Central Park
The blood-eyes blank in the ski-mask slits,
A fistful of hair beneath her.
The knife on top, its tip at her tits,
Stilled even the faintest shudder.
Beyond the hedged-in grassy glade,
The birds oblivious winging,
Still on her ears her iPod played,
Her favorite song kept singing.
His smell osmosed into her soul,
Her silence rent the night!
Her God stayed hidden like a mole,
His God laughed at his might!
-
Stopping By Woods
Here I’m reading a favorite of mine. Robert Frost’s Brilliantly simple poem.
-
Displaced
The sky’s so vast here in the Midwest
Stretching like a giant rainbow reaching
Side to side across the earth.
Some days I wonder if I climb up high
Could I just see my home from here?
But there are no tall trees in the prairie,
The highest thing a dormitory.On rainy days droplets hang like tiny mirrors,
And if they’re angled right, might
I find glimpses of forgotten faces,
Crowded lanes and streets? Which way is east?I journeyed here across the rainbow’s edge,
Resting multiple times in multiple places
Between yesterday and the day before,
Leaving in those liminal spaces
Bits of me like scattered breadcrumb trails
To stumble back before day races
On and fatal birds of prey pluck away
From the earth my traces…So here I am a hybrid mess of cultural droppings,
A patchwork dolled up clown of no renown,
Masquerading in a cap and gown,
Playing the fool and fooling none
With borrowed accents from a colonial boss
To cover up a sense of lossAt abandoning a diverse land
Of ancient gods and spicy food
For capitalism’s ugly hand,
How could it come to any good?So who am I? I ask with pain,
Bewildered by the way I’m seen,
A muddy brown-skinned splat of stain
Across the snowy landscape clean.In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
“Indians! Indians!” Columbus cried,
His heart was filled with joyful pride.In nineteen hundred and eighty-five
I came across the ocean wide,
A dotted Indian not a feathered one,
But no-one cared, the land was won! -
For Lorraine
When Do I Miss You?
I miss you in the morning scurrying
With side-long glances hurrying
Into the business of the afternoon.I miss you in my walkabout
Tom’s half-deserted streets
Filled with the bleats
Of unanswerable questions…I miss you in the past when you were not,
And yet you were…
And in the now for we are caught
By Time’s scythe, that dreadful knife.
I miss you tomorrow when your life
Slipped from my clasp to grasp a new mirth.And I miss you most in the silence of my hurt…
A Teardrop
I looked for you in the weeping
Leaves trickling down last fall
But you were not thereIn the laughter at Christmas
I listened for your voice
In the cadence of your children
But you were not thereTo hear the passing comment
That I turned to share
With you that only you
Would catch and smile
But in your chairOnly the cushions rocked
And mocked
My hopeful stare.When suddenly
You were there,
A teardrop
Balanced tantalizingly
On my nose, my tongue
Sticks out to catch you
But you never drop,
Poised…in full sight…
Within reach…unattainable…I Will Write of Love
I will write of love, my love,
When thoughts have reached their tired end
And words have lost their potent sense,
I will write to fill the silence and the tense.
I will write for only love is left to send.When all the songs and every tune
I know are sung in key and out,
I’ll find new ways I have no doubt
When words are gone I’ll script a rune.I will write of love, my love,
At noon and in the evening chill,
For not to write of love would freeze and kill
My love, my love, so I must write though you are still.I will write of love, my love, my love…
On Your Birthday
Why must the leaves start falling in October?
Why can’t I weep alone for just one year?
Why is it always Autumn on your birthday?
Why can’t I borrow Spring from selfish May?But I should stop and look around me lest
I miss resplendent nature at her best
And then I’d know that that’s the reason
You were born in this great season. -
City Notes
Family Portrait
Eight-year-old Ann-Marie drinks her milk.
The edge of morning slices through a slat
At the glasses asleep in pools of sweat.Picking her way through stubble fields
Of a riotous night her day breaks
Into shards of sharp memories strewn
Cut, bruised, and sleeping about the flat
With mum and reveling strangers and dad.She steps routinely over crackheads on the stairs . . .
Outside the jagged rain rips the tired day.Huddled in the doorway she watches
Her paper boat drown in the gutter.A Jog in the Park
The blood-eyes blank in the ski-mask slits,
A fistful of hair beneath her.
The knife on top, its tip at her tits,
Stilled even the faintest shudder.Beyond the hedged-in grassy glade,
The birds oblivious winging,
Still on her ears her ipod played,
Her favorite song kept singing.His smell osmosed into her soul,
Her silence rent the night!
Her God stayed hidden like a mole,
His God laughed at his might!Can I Play Too?
Eagerly he stumps toward the jungle gym.
The smile freezes. Hurt recognizes in the giggles
Piercing familiar derisive notes, peering fingers,
Lips curling into oohs and ahs.Shrinking from the bars into the yard
Of his solitude he contemplates
His shrunken half-made-up body
For the umpteenth time wondering.Fishing
Men with bored poles by the mucky canal
Search the sludge flotsamming past the banks
Packed with homebound crowds gathered
For a look, a laugh, and a suppertime tale.Somewhere in the city a woman routinely
Sets the table with her children and waits…
For a grapnel to grasp her jetsamming husband
As the satisfied crowd disperses excitedly.The Waiter’s Sub-text
I’ll be your waiter (hurry up, please
Take your time I’ve other folks waiting
To decide what to eat this evening.
The fish is great our special sauce
Its spicy tang sticks in your throat,
Is famous asshole!)Taxi!
Keeping the curb with pacing passersby
They prowl their bodies rough with use
And smudged paint bored with dull anticipation.
The desultory meandering ceases.
A client slides in with practiced rhythm
Man and machine plunge to it,
Pistons chug to suck the juice fast,
End the trip, dump the rider, and return
With pocketed fare and silent meter
To stalk and hustle other cabs by the curb.Sing a Song of Sixpence
Sing a song of sixpence,
A bottle full of rye,
At hundredandtwenty miles an hour
Someone’s bound to die.Sing a song of sixpence,
A vial of cocaine,
Fourandtwenty babies
Born in twisting pain.When the day is over,
There’s nothing left to sing,
Except a dirge to senselessness,
We haven’t learnt a thing.@desksDOTcom
Pursed lips lock voices stilled
By the dings and clinks of cyberchords,
The compusymphonic requiem for Gossip
Played by a hundred-piece orchestra
Of a thousand fingers conjuring information
From a netherland of flashing ciphers,
A superhighway of connecting worlds
Where screens glare back and cursers blink–
Gleeful pac-men shooting brain cells
Dead through furrowed brows. -
I Traveled to an Ancient Land
I traveled to an ancient land,
Where mountains dive into the sea.
And in the black volcanic sand
My startled footprints followed me
Like harrying questions nipping at my heels,
Springing from the ground to hound
My rootlessness with furious queries.Is this for me? This land of broken promises?
Not this but that I left behind or the one before
Or before that as well? Is this for me?
I ask on the constricted way winding
Like a periphrastic sentence to Cape Reinga,
The world’s end where oceans meet and the mighty
Tasman clashes like a hostile argument against the Pacific
Proposition of the day before, that calm acceptance
Of hum-drumming….But even in the garden where wild hydrangeas
Range profusely by Pohutukawa trees,
A serpentine nine-to-five-ness lurks,
And huddled masses grunt and scrape
Their lengthy days into much longer years…Only Tane Mahuta and his kauri trees
Stand silent witness to their buried fathers
Deep beneath Gum-Diggers Park waiting
For the angry growl of the Last Tsunami. -
Cruel April
This pitiless April morning I threw open my door
And there in a collapsed heap was an exhausted traveler,
Her straggly hair like struggling dandelions on her back,
And limbs splayed out like denuded twigs on a bare tree.
I looked and saw her still alive and asked her name,
“Spring,” she whispered, “Midwestern Spring,”
And died as the merciless rain poured down. -
Autumn Leaves
In the nostalgia of fall I marvel at the red and gold of gorgeous death as leaves yield the salad greenness of their youth to the decadence of nature’s inexorable cycle. Is this not the most beautiful quadrant of the year, this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as John Keats called it? How easily I respond to the beauty of aging flora yet am blind to resplendence elsewhere!
Do I stare at the granite faces of aging humanity and notice in their wrinkles a lifetime of experience and grandeur? Or realize that arthritic limbs struggling across my path are ancient feet nearing the mountain top for a view of the promised land? Can I gaze into the mists of watery eyes and see in their now-blurred vision a legacy of a better tomorrow for me?
Image, we are fond of saying, is everything and the only images I cherish are the shiny faces of youth leaping at me from the glossy covers of the chronicles of our times. I hurry up express elevators in the scrubbed steel and glass monuments of this new millennium, oblivious to the forlorn wisdom of forgotten pyramids and a tireless sphinx keeping vigil amid the buffeting gales of the sands of time. In the traffic of morning I impatiently sound my horn at hunched figures in slow lanes and wrinkle my nose at the smell of decay wafting my way from the outhouses of homes for the aged.
Perhaps this year, in knee-deep amazement amid the embers of dying maple leaves, I can also celebrate the lives that have struggled through spring and endured the summer’s heat. Let me remember that true beauty lies as much in the songs of experience as in the melodies of innocence.
-
Winter
Snowflakes on my recoiling cheek,
Like an unwanted lover’s caresses
Brushed away abruptly.We’ve been together too long
And I must away in search
Of warm embraces.Your lips and hands blue
My shivering skin, keep
My bed cold, chill
My tropical genes…Every time we break up,
You return to seduce me
With your lacy whiteness…Why do I open my body to you?
