Splitting an Order

 

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,

observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

It's Fine

 

A question to be answered, please:
Why do most men avoid M.D.s?
 
At thoughts of office calls we scoff
unless there’s something falling off.
 
And if our ankle’s had a twist
we hop around and then insist
 
that it’s improving very well
although, of course, it hurts like hell.
 
Sinus pressures, nasty fevers,
failures of most pain relievers,
 
bellies sad and oozing sores
propel us not through clinic doors.
 
The answer to this riddle, though,
is well concealed--although we know
 
that such recalcitrant displays
are just one part of manly ways.

Phil Huffy, first appeared in Light Poetry Magazine

My Old Aunts Played Canasta in a Snowstorm

 

I ride along in the backseat; the aunt who can drive
picks up each sister at her door, keeps the Pontiac
chugging in each driveway while one or the other
slips into her overshoes and steps out,
closing her door with a click, the wind

lifting the fringe of her white cotton scarf
as she comes down the sidewalk, still pulling on her
new polyester Christmas-stocking mittens.
We have no business to be out in such a storm,
she says, no business at all.

The wind takes her voice and swirls it
like snow across the windshield.
We're on to the next house, the next aunt,
the heater blowing to beat the band.

At the last house, we play canasta,
the deuces wild even as they were in childhood,
the wind blowing through the empty apple trees,
through the shadows of bumper crops. The cards

line up under my aunts' finger bones; eights and nines and aces
straggle and fall into place like well-behaved children.
My aunts shuffle and meld; they laugh like banshees,
as they did in that other kitchen in the 30's that
day Margaret draped a dishtowel over her face
to answer the door. We put her up to it, they say,
laughing; we pushed her. The man—whoever he was—
drove off in a huff while they laughed 'til they hiccupped,


laughing still—I'm one of the girls laughing him down the sidewalk
and into his car, we're rascals sure as farmyard dogs,
we're wild card-players; the snow thickens,
the coffee boils and perks, the wind is a red trey
because, as one or the other says,

We are getting up there in the years; we'll
have to quit sometime. But today,
today,
deal, sister, deal.

Marjorie Saiser, Lost in Seward County (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)

They Call Him Lucky

 The giant hound dog,

a centenarian
in human years,
a teenager in canine years,
 
lumbers through town
visiting old friends
and making new ones
when he digs under the fence.
 
He only barks at coyotes.
Doesn’t bite or fight.
But he isn’t on a leash.
So someone calls the cops.
 
When animal control
pulls up, he hops in
the front seat
and enjoys the scenery.
 
He poses for a mug shot
and leaves his paw prints
on his rap sheet
before he is bailed out.
 
But like a juvenile delinquent
he knows how to jimmy the locks
and sneaks out at night
and enjoys the ride again.

Sharon Waller Knutson, yourdailypoem.com, April 3, 2021

A List of Praises

 

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences. 

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river. 

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only. 

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains 

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

Anne Porter, journeywithjesus.net, April 4, 2021

At the Cross

I wait,
And time ticks past.

I gaze,
Made silent by the sight.

I watch,
As soldiers meticulously move
Executing each terrible, torturous task.

I gasp,
Still life lingers in His fragile, broken form.

I flinch,
As blow by blow,
Nails bite deep through flesh to find wood.

I stand
As He is lifted high,
Silhouetted 'gainst the sky which He has made.

I weep
As His cry echoes deep in my hardened, calloused heart.

I wail,
As He screams 'it is complete,
Finished, final, said and done.'

I fall,
As the sky turns inky black
And the sun and moon and stars forget to shine.

I kneel,
As worlds collide,
And time ticks by;
What once bound, no longer seems to hold.

I bow,
For part of me is gone,
Kept forever on Calvary's painful peak.

I wait,
At the foot of the cross, to begin my journey home.

Andy Stinson, 2011, engageworship.org 

I Return to the Night after My Grandfather's Funeral

 

My grandmother asked me that night
to sleep with her in her bed.
Though I was thirty-something,
I knew little of loss. I remember
the great weight of her as she slipped
into the soft white sheets—
a mountain inside a woman’s body.
I wore a long flannel gown with tiny violets
and she a thin flannel robe, slightly pilled and well worn,
with tiny embroidered roses.
We hardly spoke. She did not cry.
Any night stitched with that much sorrow
will linger in the heart for a lifetime.
I did not hold her—nor did she seem
to wish to be held. And when I return
to that night in my mind, I don’t try
to rewrite it. She sleeps on her side of the bed.
I sleep where my grandfather used to sleep.
I listen for the eventual slow tide of her breath.
But I am not the same version of myself
who shared a bed with her then.
Now, when I lay down beside her,
I know something more of how vast
an emptiness can be. How it can feel as if
a whole garden has been ripped up by its roots.
How sometimes in the dark, though we know
there are stars, we simply can’t open our eyes.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, October 10, 2020