Myth Dispelled

The flu vaccine cannot
give you the flu, I tell him.
It's dead virus, there's
nothing alive about it.
It can't make you sick.
That's a myth.
But if we bury it in
the grassy knoll
of your shoulder,
an inch under the stratum
corneum, as sanctioned by
your signature
in a white-coated ceremony
presided over by
my medical assistant
and then mark the grave
with a temporary
non-stick headstone,
the trivalent spirit
of that vaccine
has a 70 to 90 percent
chance of warding off
the Evil One,
and that's the God's
honest truth.

 

Adam Possner, MD/JAMA December 5, 2012 vol. 308 (21)2178 Copyright 2012, American Medical Association

The World

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli," you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to anyone among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.

 

Tony Hoagland, Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)

Retirement Home Melee at Salad Bar

They say it began with an elderly man
foraging through the icebergs and romaines.

They say another who prefers his salad
without a stranger's fingerprints

and Stop. From there, they say, curses
hissed through dentures. From there, fists.

They say it was a fracas, knocked bifocals
and clattering canes, the wooden screech

of chair legs, some to break up the scuffle
and some to shuffle off on a bad knee,

or pinned hip, or pace-makered heart.
One is bitten, they say. Another wears

a cut across his forehead, blood flowing
down the canals of his wrinkles.

Next day's the same old same old,
as they say. Back to the quiet swing

of living without velocity or fire.
Shuffleboard and Pinochle, the dull

click of knitting needles, their final
gray years going limp. Or so they say.

 

David Hernandez, Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011) 

Waging Peace

How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who
announces peace. Isaiah 52: 7

 

Not something separate. Not
a convenient screen, a wall hastily fabricated
to keep a conflict's blaze contained.
Or the self safe.

Nor something hammered out at tables.
And never sentimental, say a moonlit evening,
an incandescent sky. The Pacific Ocean
on a breathless day. You might as well

wage peace as war. You'd have to stand
exposed at the crossroads of unguarded anger,
a presence, not an absence,
not gritting your teeth. Forcing your clenched hands

open. Your heart's hard core
and everything the stubborn mind conceals
revealed. Disarmed
you may become disarming,

the terror in your unmasked face
radiant, your unshod, wounded feet beautiful
beyond words.

 

Sarah Klassan, Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers (Pax Christi, 2005)

Some Days

Some days you have to turn off the news
and listen to the bird or truck
or the neighbor screaming out her life.
You have to close all the books and open
all the windows so that whatever swirls
inside can leave and whatever flutters
against the glass can enter. Some days
you have to unplug the phone and step
out to the porch and rock all afternoon
and allow the sun to tell you what to do.
The whole day has to lie ahead of you
like railroad tracks that drift off into gravel.
Some days you have to walk down the wooden
staircase through the evening fog to the river,
where the peach roses are closing,
sit on the grassy bank and wait for the two geese.

 

Philip Terman, Our Portion (Autumn House Press, 2015)

Child's Play

I play the World Series with marbles
on our vine-laced Persian carpet:
its palaces are bases,
its bowers become dugouts
where my heroes' cards wait
for their manager's hand.
I play both sides, home and away,
hitter and fielder—as always
no one on my team but me.

Adult shapes, fat and crooked,
bald and creased or worn thin,
edge around me,
pass through the house smiling
down as if to say dear child
you know nothing outside
your magic carpet, which
one day you'll find is only a rug
that will take you no place at all.

But I have just jumped
an impossible height, caught
Roger Maris' hot line drive to right
and brought it back over the fence.
The roar of the crowd
puts any doubt to rest: in that moment I am blessed
and that moment is all there is.

 

Dan Diberthson, The Pitch Is On the Way: Poems about Baseball and Life, published by author, 2008

Just One God

And so many of us.
How can we expect Him
to keep track of which voice
goes with what request.
Words work their way skyward.
Oh Lord, followed by petition —
for a cure, the safe landing.
For what is lost, missing —
a spouse, a job, the final game.
Complaint cloaked as need —
the faster car, porcelain teeth.
That so many entreaties
go unanswered
may say less about our lamentable
inability to be heard
than our inherent flawed condition.

Why else, at birth, the first sound
we make, that full-throttled cry?
Of want, want, want.
Of never enough. Desire
as embedded in us as the ancestral tug
in my unconscienced dog who takes
to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far
from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble.
Left behind, I go about my superior business,
my daily ritual I could call prayer.

But look, this morning, in my kitchen,
I’m not asking for more of anything.
My husband slices bread,
hums a tune from our past.
Eggs spatter in a skillet.
Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass
by the open window wobble
in a radiant and — dare I say it?—
merciful light.

 

Deborah Cummings, Counting the Waves (Word Technological Communication, 2006)

Design

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the Arctic Circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

 

Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001)

The Radiation Waiting Room

They bring us to this pastel room,
          point to the lockers,
          point to the dressing rooms.
It could almost be a gym,
          only there’s a wheelchair, there’s Health News,
          there’s a complicated flower jigsaw puzzle,
          there are romance novels to borrow
          in case you will be returning often.
We change into gowns that tie in the back;
          some of us get to keep on our shirts,
          some our pants;
          we all wear shoes.
Those of us who have come so often
          wait comfortably,
          take care of the new ones,
          offer answers, directions, suggestions.
Only we are careful not to say
          how long we’ve been coming
          or what we have or
          what they’ve done
          or are about to do.

 

Susan Herron Sibbet, Great Blue (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006)

The Pen

Three days before my father died
I lost the silver pen with my name on it,
a twenty-first birthday gift from my aunt
I’d kept for almost ten years.

That day, supervising students in Khayelitsha
putting up a netball hoop, I came home
to ask to borrow his tools.
We walked around the garage and I ticked
off the ladder, drill, nails and screwdriver on my list,
and he suggested, I add a hammer and level.
Somewhere between stacking and loading
the car, I lost my pen without even noticing
it had slipped from my hand.

When I went home late that day,
I negotiated with loss as I always do,
not going back to the garage to look for the pen
in case it wasn’t there,
to keep its absence incomplete
so it could come back one day.

In three days,
the impossible sequences of death.

I went back
over everything we’d said that day
and the years when we didn’t speak
and the reconciliation, almost wordless,
when we walked towards each other with our eyes down
and wept while we hugged.

The night he died
I felt the completeness of loss,
of absence without negotiation,

and yet what was still there,
that moving towards each other,
without looking.

 

Gabeba Baderoon, A History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018)

Be a smooth way before me

Be a smooth way before me,

Be a guiding star above me,

Be a keen eye behind me,

This day, this night, forever.

I am weary and I am forlorn,

Lead me to the land of the angels;

I think it is time I went for a space

To the court of Christ, to the peace of heaven;

If only you, O God of life,

Be at peace with me, be my support,

Be to me as a star, be to me as a helm,

From my lying down in peace to my rising anew.

 

from the Carmina Gadelica, newedenministry.com September 12, 2021

We've Had This Conversation Before

We’ve had this conversation before,
my daughter and I, many times,
about what she might buy
with her allowance, about candy,
about how her brother annoys her,
about where her birth mother might be,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my son and I, many times,
about how fast he is, how fast horses are,
about candy, about how his sister bosses him,
about how much a horse costs,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my wife and I, many times,
about how tired we are,
about what we might buy them
and how much it all costs,
about how they annoy us, how fast
they’re growing, how scared we are
about what might happen, about this life,
this life, so tiring and wonderful,
and how, if we could, we’d repeat it,
this life, many times,
many times.

 

Joseph Mills, This Miraculous Turning (Press 53, 2014)

The Love Nest

Well, I don't care, Denise,
if you didn't win
the Dairy Princess Pageant.
By the time we're married
next spring, the new house
on the farm will be finished,
with a double garage
for your car and my pickup.
We'll panel the basement
with walnut veneer or maple
and tear down the old house
when my old man moves to town.
There'll be a new steel barn
and another Harvestore silo.
You know as well as I do,
Denise, you could hardly ask
for a better deal.
You're beautiful, Denise,
and I think if I bit
into your shoulder right now,
you'd taste like a watermelon.

 

Leo Dangel, Home from the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997) 

Jane

Jane, the old woman across the street,
is lugging big black trash bags to the curb.
It's snowing hard, and the bags are turning white,
gradually disappearing in the storm.

Jane is getting ready to put her house on the market
and move into a home of some sort. A facility.
She's just too old to keep the place going anymore,
and as we chat about this on the sidewalk
I'm thinking, I'm so glad this isn't going to happen to me.

It seems like a terrible fate, to drag out your trash bags
and then head for a facility somewhere.
And all the worse to be old in a facility. But then,
that's the whole reason you go there in the first place.

But the great thing about being me, I'm thinking,
as I continue my morning walk around the block,
is that I'm not going to a facility of any sort.

That's for other people. I intend to go on
pretty much as I always have, enjoying life,
taking my morning walk, then coffee
and the newspaper, music and a good book.
Europe vaguely in the summers.
Then another year just like this one, on and on,
ad infinitum.

Why change this? I have no intention of doing so.
What Jane is doing—growing old,
taking out her ominous black trash bags
to vanish terribly in the snow, getting ready
for someone to drive her to the facility—

that may be her idea of the future (which I totally respect),
but it certainly isn't mine.

 

George Bilgere, writersalmanac.publicradio.org October 9, 2011 

You're the Top

At words poetic
I'm so pathetic
That I always have found it best
Instead of getting them off my chest,
To let 'em rest, unexpressed.
I hate paradin'
My serenadin'
As I'll probably miss a bar.
So if this ditty
Is not so pretty,
At least it will tell you how great you are.

You're the top.
You're the Coliseum.
You're the Top.
You're the Louvre Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss.
You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you're Mickey Mouse!
You're the Nile.
You're the Tower of Pisa.
You're the smile
On the Mona Lisa.
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop!
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.

You're the top.
You're a silver dollar.
You're the top.
You're an Arrow collar.
You're the nimble tread on the feet of Fred Astaire.
You're an O'Neill drama, you're Whistler's mama, you're Camembert.
You're the pearl
That the divers fetch up.
Milton Berle
And tomato ketchup.
I'm a toy balloon that's fated soon to pop.
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

You're the top.
You're a new invention.
You're the top.
You're the fourth dimension.
You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain.
You're the National Gallery, your Garbo's Salary, you're cellophane.
You're romance.
You're the steppes of Russia.
You're the Pants
On a Roxy usher.
I'm a broken doll, a folderol, a flop!
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

Cole Porter (author), Robert Kimball (editor), Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics (Library of America, 2006)

Cousins

We meet at funerals

every few years—another star

in the constellation of our family

put out—and even in that failing

light, we look completely

different, completely the same.

“What are you doing now?”

we ask each other, “How

have you been?”  At these times

the past is more palpable

than our children waiting

at home or the wives and husbands tugging

at our sleeves.  “Remember . . . ?”
we ask, “Remember the time . . . ?
And laughter is as painful

as if our ribs had secret

cracks in them.

Our childhoods remain

only in the sharp bones

of our noses, the shape

of our eyes, the way our genes call out

to each other in the high-pitched notes

that only kin can hear.

How much of memory

is imagination?  And if loss

is an absence, why does it grow

so heavy?  These are the questions

we mean when we ask: “Where

are you living now?” or

“How old is your youngest?"

Sometimes I feel the grief

of these occasions swell

in me until I become

an instrument in which language rises

like music.  But all

that the others can hear

is my strangled voice calling

“Goodbye . . .” calling

“Keep in touch . . .”

with the kind of sound

a bagpipe makes, its bellow heaving

and even its marching music funereal.

 

Linda Pastan, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (W. W. Norton, 1999)