Category: childhood
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Mr. Wright’s Kitchen Table 1966
green stained gym shoes sweaty tee-shirt sticks to your back smell of wet cut grass blisters from hand shears the sun grows hot you walk faster to finish by noon Mr. Wright calls come inside pours coke over ice condensation puddles on kitchen table he offers more coke; you drink that, too he asks if…
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Fourth of July
Hot summer, childhood days Wetting a worm Watching a bobber Dance in the sun Believing today is the day You’ll catch the monster fish Every boy knows it’s there Lurking in a deep hole Too smart to bite the hook Too strong to be held by a thin line Laughing at their belief In a…
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Sand in my shoes
I wish I were a mystical man but my toes curl into the sand. I daydream intricate math equations, design homes and landscapes unable to afford the cost. I intuit award winning poems and novels I have no patience or skills to write. Yet, still I wish I were a mystical man but my toes…
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Translation
05/20 – sometimes I scan magazines articles to see if I want to dig deeper and they feel like poems – this is a poem I call Scan and Pick poem (in the order words occurred) from a New Yorker article this morning: =================================================== multilingual childhood between languages find myself untrammelled lyrical linguists Ay-Speak unabridged…
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Translation
05/20 – sometimes I scan magazines articles to see if I want to dig deeper and they feel like poems – this is a poem I call Scan and Pick poem (in the order words occurred) from a New Yorker article this morning: multilingual childhood between languages find myself untrammelled lyrical linguists Ay-Speak unabridged original…
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I do not own a gun
My two older sisters had matching dolls. I had cars and trucks, a Roy Rogers’ holster with a silver cap gun. I used to hide in their closet and played with their dolls when no one was around. My mother was a girl scout leader; I know all the songs. I belonged to the boy…
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For lack of empathy
I don’t know why, but fifty years on I thought of you, tall lanky friend of my youth, we used to sometimes talk walking home from high school; me bombastic and loud, all full of myself; you quiet, deferential and shy. We never became close; you a confirmed loner me a loner, hidden beneath layers…
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Two lifetimes ago
two lifetimes ago, returning from a lonely hike In mushroom mountains sat under a bush, light rain falling in the yard of a church I did not attend Johnny Cash sang about Sunday morning coming down on the radio of an idling car I left my body unburied, never returned and found a new one…
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Run-on sentence memory of Dad
My father dropped me off my first year of college, notebooks, pens, a dictionary and Bible in a cardboard box and a dress shirt I never wore on a hanger my mother packed for church and a suitcase of clothes, I was not an easy child to raise and he was nervous about me going…
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Graveside manners
I still carry my father’s casket, Holding onto the side rail As we pull him from the hearse, Unable to release my grip And say goodbye. I have questions in need of answers And he still won’t give them up, Even in death. I still carry my father’s casket Hoping he answers – just once.…
My husband's poetry 