This summer the Bishop of Beaumont is promoting a good idea and the organizational skills to make it so throughout the diocese: small, easily transportable plastic bags of needful items for anyone displaced by hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, or other disasters.
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A day so hot that ordinary tasks / Exhaust the body and the soul; to grasp / The handle of a water tap wearies the mind / To grasp a simple thought eludes one’s will /
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The clapped-out Boeing / wheezed to the gate // The ground crew jumped / name-tags rattling // And swiftly moored / the shining ocean-bird
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All in the same sky:
Luna, Venus, Jupiter
While the soft winds sigh…
An advert assures us its product is jaw-dropping
If true, this loss of body parts would be painful
And which part of the purchaser’s jaw drops?
She adopted us several weeks ago And after the usual hissings and spittings Was accepted by the other cats…
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Today I smelled tobacco from a pipe
Although there was no one around except
Perhaps the ghost of the hardware store savant
Whose wisdom filled the air along with smoke
Books have many authors, and the Author of All Blesses them and us with their waves of words
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Someone near and dear to my pancreas gave (“gifted” is not a verb) me one of those clever aluminum MeWatches that claim to make one’s life more interesting in many ways and which come without any instructions because not sending instructions with a product is such a cool thing now.
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Short strings of words that breathe and sigh as songs
Sunflowers fainting in the afternoon
A treefrog pulsing on the windowpane
Ladybugs drowsing on a tomato leaf
All literature is world literature / A culture that hugs itself to itself / And refuses to share and share alike / Consumes itself in a closed loop, and dies
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A dog, a pocketknife, a twenty-two
The rightful possessions of every Texas lad
For working out the values he must live up to
The virtues that he learned from his solid ol’ Dad
Each Altar is Minas Tirith these days
A city of kings and of the true King
Behind whose twice-barred gates and golden doors
The faithful may find refuge for a time
Tomorrow his mother and his little girl Will meet him at the gate and take him home No more white suits and big boondocker boots No wire, no bells, no lining up for counts
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The topic of trust came up the other day when one of the prisoners I visit each week remarked on the challenge of knowing how to find reliable information about the Virus-of-Many-Names.
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Just as a father passes on to his child The popular music of his long-lost youth A teacher passes on to those in his care The ‘way-cool poetry of his own lost youth
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Today we harvest broken bits of glass
Fragments of old toys, bit of aluminum
A Sylvania flash cube still intact
From a picture taken decades ago
Through the glass one can see a slender arm
And a shift in the light shows it to be
All splotchy in decaying reds, greens, and blues
Seemingly covered in a tropical blight
The window slides open to a beautiful smile…
So there you were with a tube in your arm
And a crossword puzzle and pen in your hands
And a lovely view of a sunlit roof
With windblown debris whipping between the vents
Garage-sale-blocked again, the one-lane road Hosts cars on both sides, and oxygened-men Defiantly aluminum-caning the middle In their Quixotic quest for eternal youth
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