Coffee and Cookies after Mass
Only there is no coffee after Mass
No cookies or Kool-Aid for the kidlets
The parish hall has been locked up for months
And you know, there’s just something wrong with that
Category: Poetry
The Star-Spangled Story
Many sing this anthem but do not know the tale,
They do not know the dark, the unsettling suspension
As Francis Scott Key and his prisoner soldiers
Waited hoping that God, would give them attention…
A Child of God and of Long Summer Afternoons
Do you remember lying on the grassy bank
On a summer afternoon, holding very still…
The Writer, the Reader, and the Synapse Between Them
Like a 16-year-old crossing a field at noon
A little word has a lot of ground to cover in the heat
A mile of open ground to a wall and some trees
Where confusion does not want it to arrive
Midsummer Mysteries
One of the merry mysteries of midsummer
Is that midsummer isn’t midsummer at all
Maybe it was, back in the shadows of time
When Tolkien’s fairies blessed a happier world
The 7th of June, 1944 and 1970
My father beached at Normandy on the second day
(He was okay with having missed the first)
From there through France to Belgium in the mud
For a bloody Christmas in the icy Bulge
This Homely Land
This massive land that I see
Spread from sea to shining sea
Is a very unique lot
It’s been called a melting pot…
Memorial Day 2021
Memorial Day is when we remember our friends
As they were…
DaddyPaw’s Letters from the CCC Camp
He found his DaddyPaw’s young adulthood
In a box of letters from New Mexico
About fighting forest fires and building fence
To the stockyards at Magdalena
Color Me Crimson
As history’s mundane toil, and epic battles ensue
It’s clear no race is exempt
From ways that are imperfect, unkempt.
To God, Who Gives Joy
You still approach the Altar as a child
As you once were, and are, and will be forever
For God will have it so, will have you so –
Enchanted by His magic – a little boy
Squirrels Without End, Amen
Whenever I take my book to the front-yard oak
The squirrel stretched from the feeder to the trunk
Flees in a seed-strewn panic across the lawn
To a farther tree, free of human menace
Arthur’s Song
It was at court our eyes first met,
Many others were there,
We had not spoken yet.
Though I conversed with others,
and from you stood apart,
Like foals to their mothers,
To you went my heart.
This Side of the Covid
Infections are up and deaths are ‘way down
Or is it that infections are down and deaths are up?
Schools must be closed and the restaurants open
Or schools must be open and restaurants closed…
My Dearest Ana
My dearest Ana,
You lied to and enslaved me
For which I bear animosity
Because of your “generosity”
My body has become an atrocity
Charity?
You were so thankful, and my friends
Were so proud of my gracious
Charity, seeing
I had aided
You…
Barney Fife! Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour
Police chiefs are costumed as admirals these days
Or as generals, with medals and eagles and stars
Peaked caps and polished boots, more Patton than Patton
In stern command of parking-lot plywood lecterns
An Unskilled Rotor-Tiller Tiller of the Soil
The morning was fresh and cool and damp and still
I wheeled the tiller into the garden patch
Fresh gasoline, then primed the little bulb
And turned the red plastic lever just so
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Shaven-headed twit in a cartoon tee
Ditched…
Colorful Carrots
Springtime is here!
So full of color and cheer!
The flowers reveal their pretty heads
Green is coming instead of brown and red
